PeterC65

I've tried capturing the Moon and Planets and then later stacking the frames with AutoStakkert and doing some image processing. It works well, particularly for Moon detail, but I really want to see things on the night which is where this new SharpCap tool makes such a huge difference. It does at least as good a job as I managed with post processing, bearing in mind that I'm no AP expert.

The other thing I like is that it makes it possible to watch changes as they happen. So for Jupiter, the GRS moving around and transits of moons or their shadows. You can watch these live as you would visually, and record time lapse AVI files. I've yet to watch a transit but watched the GRS for a while the other night.

Previously I didn't really bother observing the Moon and Planets via EAA, but now I'm actually looking forward to observing them.

In the latest release of SharpCap (18th December) Robin has added surface alignment to the new planetary live stacking tool so that it can now live stack a detailed view of the Moon as well as a complete lunar or planetary disc.

I've just tried this out with some old captures of Moon detail and it works really well, completely removing that atmospheric wobble that you normally see.

For both whole discs and Moon detail I'm just using Fine Sharpening, set to 1.000, rather than fiddling with the wavelet sharpening, and using Auto Adjust Brightness/Colour. This is simple to do and gives great results.

I've been using Topaz DeNoise up until recently and it's given me good results. But it failed to remove the background sky noise from a nice image of the Flame Nebula that I'd taken so I trialled NoisXTerminator and have now switched to this. It does a much better job than DeNoise of removing background sky noise and the noise in nebulae detail. There are two controls, Denoise which I leave set at 100%, and Detail which I set somewhere between 10 and 100. The Detail setting seems mainly to affect how the stars look, 10 leaves them as they were in the original image and as you increase to 100 they get more and more punchy.

I came across this tool yesterday. It goes some way to answering your question I think, letting you determine what is preventing you from seeing detail, whether it is the seeing (it usually is) or the camera or the optics.

1 hour ago, bosun21 said:

I don't do EAA on the planets as you really need to take short videos 1-2 minutes to punch through the seeing and atmospheric turbulence. I generally take 90 - 120 second videos at 200 FPS and then stack them in Autostakkert III and finish with derotating in Winjupos then Registax 6/Astrosurface. I'm really getting into planetary imaging and thoroughly enjoy it. I'll be picking your brain when the planets are gone and I'll be doing EEA at native f4.7 with my go to dobsonian. Which plate solving software do I need to download again to use with Sharpcap? I hope you won't mind the questions I'll ask you then.

I didn't do planetary EAA either until SharpCap implemented live stacking for planets, but that's been a complete game changer. I have recorded video for later processing and got reasonable results in the past, but now I can get results just as good on the night. I'm looking forward to watching a moon transit, hopefully before Jupiter disappears.

Another improvement to SharpCap is that it now has the option for built in plate solving so you don't need to download a third party tool. The built in plate solving is very fast, almost instantaneous.

26 minutes ago, bosun21 said:

For planetary you would want to be nearer f15 with a 2.9um camera. Which barlow are you using Peter?

I think the ratio of F / pixel size is suppose to be between 4 and 5, and at F12 I was operating at 4.1 which should have been OK. At this magnification focusing can be difficult so that may have been the problem. Jupiter was certainly bigger with the Barlow!

I was using the Baader Hyperion Zoom Barlow which is specified at x2.25 but I measured it at x2.4 with the Uranus-C camera. I also have the Baader Q Barlow which is specified at x1.3 if you just use the bare lens but I measured it at x1.7 with the camera. With the Explorer 150 the x2.4 Barlow is good for Planets but little else (and until recently observing the Planets via EAA was disappointing), but the x1.7 Barlow is useful for smaller galaxies (F8.5 is a little too slow for DSO EAA but still usable).

I did another EAA session last night. This time with the Explorer 200PDS Barlowed to F12 which should have been right for observing the Planets, and with the 72mm refractor fitted with the x1.0 field flattener which gives a nice crisp wide field of view.

The intention was to observe Jupiter but with the Barlow it was a bit fuzzy ...

So I removed the Barlow and it actually looked better (at F5) ...

The highlights of the evening where seeing The Tadpoles (IC410) for the first time as I'd only recently become aware of this feature right next to the Letter Y Cluster (NGC1893), and managing to see Uranus with the camera for the first time (just a blue green disc).

Here are The Tadpoles, just to the left of the Y, observed using the 72mm refractor (which happened to have the filter wheel attached allowing me to use the UHC filter).

I was looking at the camera analysis feature in SharpCap today and there is a graph that shows Faintest Detectable Object against Exposure Time but the faintness scale is in electrons per pixel which doesn't easily relate to object magnitude. Here is a screen shot of what it shows you from the SharpCap User Manual ...

The graph depends only on the camera but I expect the connection between electrons per pixel and object magnitude depends on the scope and the object type.

I'd recommend using a Bahtinov mask. Make sure you can see the cameras image on a laptop while being able to adjust focus (I'd recommend using SharpCap software for this). Put the camera into live view mode and try to get a frame rate of at least one per second. Pick any bright star and centre the scope on it with the Bahtinov mask fitted. Zoom in on the star so you can easily see the Bahtinov mask lines and adjust the focus to get them right.

I find this far easier than any other way. For the Moon and Planets just focus on a star first.

If you leave the scope to cool for 30 minutes and don't change the setup it will remain in focus all night.

You've posted this in the EAA forum so I'm assuming you're not doing AP.

For EAA, where you're generally wanting a fairly quick result, it's more a case of how faint can you see within the context of a fairly short exposure time.

The maximum exposure time is limited to about 30s if you're using an AZ mount. You can go much longer with an EQ mount but then it becomes more like AP timescales. I never go beyond 15s, but I sometimes stack for 15 minutes. Longer stacks seem to reduce the noise and bring out more detail but I'm finding that longer individual frame exposures are better for seeing faint objects, even if the total exposure time is the same.

The same things apply as for visual, so more aperture helps, and narrowband filters help but only with emission nebulae.

If you use SharpCap and get it to analyse your camera it can work out for you what the best gain and exposure time should be, but these are dependant on the camera and conditions rather than on the object magnitude. Personally I always use the same gain (x400 for my camera) and exposure times of between 4s and 15s. 4s is my default but I increase it if I'm using a narrowband filter or if the object is very faint. This is for DSOs, the Moon and Planets are another story.

In practice I find that how faint I can see is greatly dependent on the type of object. So I've been able to see magnitude 17 stars but struggle with some magnitude 9 reflexion nebulae.

1 hour ago, Franklin said:

Get something like this.

 

The paper shim is considerably less expensive!

On 10/12/2023 at 09:34, johnturley said:

The two saddles are out of alignment in azimuth by 1.2 degrees and there's no adjustment for that so I'll need to give it some thought in daylight.

That's what I found when I mounted both my Tak 100 DZ and ES 127 Refractors on this mount, there is fine adjustment in altitude not not in azimuth, please let me know if you come up with a solution.

The two saddles were converging so today I have set up in daylight, centred the 200PDS mounted on the primary saddle at a distant object and checked the 72mm refractor mounted on the secondary saddle. It was out by 1.2 degrees like I had noticed at night, so I've used a feeler gauge as a shim between the saddle and the dovetail and with 0.5mm of shim the two saddles are aligned.

Searching around for something that is 0.5mm thick I've settled on a piece of my wife's drawing paper and glued that to the inside face of the saddle. It has fixed the azimuth offset, at least for the 72mm refractor. I think good paper should be OK as the dovetail bar has a centre part so the pressure is distributed, and anyway, most of the clamp pressure is on the edges of the dovetail. A metal shim would be better.

53 minutes ago, SwiMatt said:

Such amazing pictures you are posting @PeterC65. To be honest, I'm not sold yet but you're doing lots to make me wanna try EAA! 🤩

I was pretty blown away by some of the things I saw last night, even though they are familiar objects. I really enjoy doing EAA, but I'm also looking forward to trying visual with the new 200PDS. My plan is to have it mounted alongside the 72mm refractor equipped with the StellaLyra UFF 30mm eyepiece to give me an alternative widefield view of the sky.

SharpCap has a live stacking method that aligns on a comet rather than on the stars. I tried it last year and it works well if you want a good view on the night.

I finally managed to use the new Live Planetary Stacking feature last night. It’s amazing, a complete game changer for planetary EAA making it possible to do for the first time really.

Usually I just give the Planets a cursory look when I do EAA but last night I spent an hour observing Jupiter, coming back to it twice during the session and seeing the Great Red Spot for the first time.

I used the RAW8 colour space and a small ROI about four times the size of the planet, then set the planetary stacking tool going with a stack length of 1000 frames, just using the fine sharpening setting set to 1.000 and auto adjusting the brightness and colour. This is a fairly simple setup but gave great results on Jupiter.

Shorter exposure times seem to give a crisper view, I was using 6ms, and an IR pass filter improved things further, but at the expense of colour.

Here is the live stack from last night with a UV/IR cut filter …

and another with an IR pass filter …

I was using an Explorer 200PDS at its native F5 as I was testing this new scope. Next time I will add a Barlow and try at a more appropriate (for my camera) F12.

I managed a great EAA session last night despite the patchy cloud early on. This was first light for the AZ-EQ5 mount and the Explorer 200PDS which I’ve had for a couple of weeks now and have been itching to try. The mount is an absolute joy and the 200PDS let me see noticeably more than I’ve been able to with the 150PDS.

Given the new kit, I wanted to observe a few different types of target so I chose some nebulae, IC348, M1, NGC1491, NGC1555, NGC1579, a couple of clusters, M35 and the adjacent NGC2158, some galaxies, M74, M81, M82, NGC772, NGC925, and my favourite bits of Orion, M42, IC343, NGC2023, NGC2024.

The field of view of the 200PDS is a bit smaller than the 150PDS so some targets, like M35 and M42, didn’t really fit, but those that did showed much more detail than I have seen before. I had my best view yet of the Horsehead Nebula with some great detail of the adjacent Lump Star …

and the Flame Nebula looked amazing …

NGC772 and NGC925 are new to me and the 200PDS was able to resolve detail in them which is very promising for Galaxy Season in the New Year.

Another first was using the brand new Live Planetary Stacking feature in SharpCap. This is a total game changer for EAA. Observing the planets used to be rubbish with EAA but last night I spent an hour observing Jupiter, coming back to it twice during the session and seeing the Great Red Spot for the first time.

I was observing for six hours which is by far my longest session. By the end the 200PDS primary mirror was covered in dew so it looks like I will need a dew heater for that. The 72mm refractor that I also had mounted on the AZ-EQ5 remained dew free however.

All the attached images are live stacks from last night, just with a bit of cropping.

3 hours ago, johnturley said:

Also I couldn't get the mount to track very well in AZ mode, I tried one star alignment using Jupiter (while looking at Jupiter), but it still didn't work very well. Which tracking mode did you use, after I have sold my ES 127, I think that I will put the mount back into EQ mode. 

I was using AZ mode last night after doing a 2 star alignment. The tracking and GOTO performed really well. I was doing EAA and so plate solved for every target and the mount was always within 0.1 degrees right across the sky. When I centred on the target it brought it right into the centre of the field of view and kept it there.

There's been a lot of patchy cloud here but it's started to clear and is forecast to be gone by 10pm. I'm out with the new AZ-EQ5 mount loaded up with the new Explorer 200PDS and the existing 72mm refractor, both with Uranus-C cameras. I'm warmish inside but with so much new kit I've been in and out.

The new mount is very impressive. It's handling the two scopes without any problems, even though the wind is gusting which probably isn't helping with 200PDS. It seems much more precise than my old one, just going to the right spot. The two saddles are out of alignment in azimuth by 1.2 degrees and there's no adjustment for that so I'll need to give it some thought in daylight.

The Explorer 200PDS is doing a better job than the 150PDS and it has about 10mm more in focus which is useful, but the weather conditions are probably not good enough to make a fair comparison.

Just looking at NGC1491 as I type, which to be fair is looking much better than it did with the 150PDS under the same settings (but less cloud and wind).

I've just collimated my new Explorer 200PDS and the primary springs on it seem pretty meaty, 1mm diameter in cross section I'd say, and it doesn't look like the mirror can move about.

With any luck I might get a chance to use it for the first time tonight.

TS also sell their own version of the Sky-Watcher Quatro focuser. It looks very similar and is available from FLO (here).

I've been using the standard dual speed Sky-Watcher focuser for a while on my 150PDS. It works OK but needs adjusting to get it there. I have the same focuser on my new 200PDS and have been wondering whether there might be something better. It seems that a replacement focuser is always going to cost the thick end of £200 and that's just for a standard Crayford. For anything better you need to pay nearer £300 and at that price the best option is probably a Baader SteelTrack (they seem to get good reviews).

Wow! Very impressive, and a great way to summarise your year of observing.

I particularly liked the widefield image of the Orion complex. So many things to see there and incredible to be able to make out the Horsehead Nebula even in a really widefield shot. I'm looking forward to pointing my new FMA135 at Orion when it comes back in to view for me.

You could add a low cost camera to your finder and use this for plate solving.

10 hours ago, bosun21 said:

You can easily adjust the clutches to provide more tension. Just remove the fixing screw and with the supplied spanner turn the brass square clockwise until it just starts to grip the axis then turn it back until free again. Refit the lever and screw.

Is this possible with an AZ-EQ5? The clutches are both winged plastic collars that rotate about the axes. They don't seem to have fixing screws. The photo below shows the altitude clutch, the azimuth clutch is similar.

I also use a 6" Newtonian on an AZ tripod mount and have just upgraded my mount, partly so that I could use an 8" Newtonian.

Newtonians are very big. Even the 6" is quite a thing to handle. My new mount (Sky-Watcher AZ-EQ5) can handle the 8" OK but I wouldn't go bigger than that. I think you do find people putting 6" and 8" Newtonians on AZ and EQ tripod mounts, but only rarely do people do this with 10" and above Newtonians. With scopes that big a Dobsonian mount is much more practical and cost effective. With their lower centre of mass they also keep the eyepiece at a more sensible height from the ground.

With my 8" Newtonian on the AZ-EQ5 in AZ mode without a tripod extension I can get to 80 degrees without the scope hitting the tripod by the way.

Nice and crisp. You should try it in colour!