Ags

I believe Mars was named for the war god partly because of its red color and also for its erratic and often retrograde motion in the sky. Deimos and Phobos were discovered and named in modern times and given names fitting for the satellites of a war god.

Looking really good.

This is an eyepiece I have wanted to try for a while. Maybe not quite as optically good as the ES68 24mm but still very good apparently and a great weight and price.

Say "eyepiece" three times and you are hooked!

I am very happy with an ES 68° 20mm with my C6 at f6.3. I used to have the ES 24mm and it was flawless but a little on the heavy side for me. I started with Hyperions and i agree they were abominable in faster scopes. Great at f13 though! Also ... no fishbowling effect in my ES eyepieces.

I tried an alternate process in astrosurface. Not sure if I pushed it too far...

I think I improved focus tonight by focusing on the moons. This was a three minute sequence of 2.5 ms frames at 90 fps. Stacked the best 30% in AS!3 and processed in Registax and Gimp. From left to right the moons are Callisto, Europa, and Io.

Verrry nice!

I had a Castor and can't believe it weighs less than 2kgs. I certainly wouldn't consider it in a travel setup. On the other hand I can't imagine the Castor causing scopes to bash into tripod legs. With a Castor, the scope must be perfectly balanced, so there is no reason for sudden scope movements. Why not an ES 68° 16mm - I have owned the 20 and 24 in the range and I hear the 16 is just as good.

12

Gaps can be expensive!

I forgot - inbetween AS!3 and Gimp is some wavelets and color balancing in RegiStax 6.

Thanks! I have just started doing animations, this only my third. I use a C6 and AZ-GTI with an ASI485MC. I used a wider 640 by 480 ROI to include the moons, I was very lucky they were so close. At 640x480 I can only get 100 frames per second. I had to put frame length down to only 2.5 ms because of atrocious seeing, but at least the night was clear and Jove was relatively bright. I just shoot 2 minute sequences in a loop, batch stack the vids in AutoStakkert 3 (making sure to remember to put an alignment point on each moon), then I load all the TIFFs as layers in Gimp and make the animated GIF.

Ganymede (left), Europa (transiting with shadow), Io (right) Amsterdam (50+ north), bad seeing, 16 2-minute sequences,100 fps, 2.5 ms frames, 250 gain AZ-GTi, C6, 1.3x barlow, ASI485MC, AS!3, Registax 6, Gimp

Here is the full animation. I should have shot for another half hour. Coulda shoulda...

first few frames...

Heres the first frame of the animation:

I was watching it on my computer screen. Seeing was really bad though - I dropped down to 2.5 ms subs.

I took a quick widefield capture of Jupiter and its moons the other night. Fron left to right: Europa, Io, Callisto and Ganymede. Quite pleased with how it came out 😀

You know you have to get the 13 to complete the set, it's the law 🤣

It's worth doing a proper study, but anecdotally I would say that large solar eruptions seem to be caused by thick cloud cover over back garden. There is certainly a causal relationship

It must be Christmas.... because the book is ready!!! I am pleased to announce that Discovering Double Stars II is now available for free download and from Amazon or Lulu. It covers 950 doubles and includes a stack of deep sky objects too! I have rethought the layout to make even more usable in the field (or in your recliner while sipping iced tea). Have a look at the PDF here (identical to the print PDF with one extra page to get correct facing pages in PDF viewers): https://discovering-astronomy.eu/discovering_doubles.html Also I have ensured there are print options in both color and black and white to shave a few pennies from printing costs.

The undrizzled version.

It didn't stay very clear, but I had a go though thin cloud. I would estimate the cloud was cutting about a magnitude (at least) of light. But I could see the GRS was on show so I persisted and shot about an hour of 10 ms frames at high gain. I think shooting without a barlow is not working for me, also I see lots of successful C6 images on CN shot with a color camera + barlow. I will try next time with slight barlowing for approximately f13. I tried 1.5 drizzle but I don't think it helped. I'll post an undrizzled version later.

To be fair, H2 is very leaky stuff. It's the smallest molecule after all. And it is a strong greenhouse gas. One of the downsides of a hydrogen economy.