Simon128D

Hi folks, 
This time of year again where cold temps and dew become a problem for our gear but this year, twice now, I've had my primary mirror on my C11 dew over and I do not recall that happening on my last year but I seld took it out in colder weather. 

As you can see in the photo it is there and when I am imaging I can tell it has happened as I would see the histogram drop and would have to increase my gain by 10 to compinsate. No doubt I am loose valuable resolution and clarity. Of course when this happens my corrector plate dews over but I resolve this with a quick blast from a hair dryer and then letting the glass cool for 5 minutes before my next capture.

To get to the point, can anyone suggest anything that might help? 

The one thing I can be certain of is that the WiFi SSID from the dongle will always be "SynScan_WiFi_****"
**** being the unique ID for each dongle. 

You can see mine in the images below. 

This is how the WiFi appears in WiFi settings on my phone, after I have connected to it. The "internet may not be available" is totally normal and desired and the "!" on the WiFi icon on the notifications bar at the top of the phone should be there.  

When I load up SynScan Pro app and press on connect at the top it instantly connects and briefly displays the IP address, like this: 

Once connected you'll see "Equatorial Mode" or "Alt-Az" mode, depending on your mount and thats all there is to it. 

The ESP SSID you are seeing is not any Skywatch SSID I have ever heard of, so not sure what it is. These dongles trasmit a Wireless G signal, so unless your phones WiFi chip does not support wireless g is the only idea I can think of right now. 
I find the app is broken on my S21 Ultra so I use my old Galaxy S8 as my hand controller now - which is what you see in the photos. 

Something odd there for sure. I use a Synscan WiFi and that is not what the SSID is meant to be. I will try to take some screen grabs of mine soon 

May I ask what your phone is and where did you get he app from, the Play store or did you download the newest version from Skywatcher website and install on Android in developer mode to allow unsigned install of an app outside of the store? 

Seeing wasn't the best, so did this at stock FL to get the best results. 
Not great but I was able to get 90% of the event before conditions went super bad. 
Indivitual images were not worth sharing but decided it was worth while making an animation out of them all. Almost two and half hours worth of grabs about 10-15 minutes apart. 

Since I had over two hours worth of data I though why not derotate it. Probably silly to do so at such a low FL but it wasn't too bad, just some funkyness to the left size of the disk. 

Been a long time since I did any lunar imaging. 
The moon was very low at the time of imaging, I started at 18:10 and took the captures while I was cooking dinner. 

I decided that to give me the best results wiht the C11 I put on the focal reducer and did each grab at 5000 frames and stacked the best 15%
I recorded at way too low exposure and gain, resulting in AS3 not being able to place any alignment points, so I had to do that manually. I was treating the histogram on ASI Studio as if I was imaging Jupiter 🤦‍♂️

Anyway here is the result. 

Thanks for comfirming. 

I have always adjusted my waveletts before de-rotating. I am not sure if that its the done thing but I get my best results that way. 

So I do all my stacking in AS3, then do my wavelets, RGB Balance and histogram adjustments in Registax and I then bring all those images in WinJUPOS. 

With the de-rotated image I will bring back in to Regi see of any - very fine - tweaks can bring out more detail, then its off to GIMP or PS to adjust saturation. 

Hope that helps but I am sure some of the highly experience folk here will give you better advice, this is what works for me. 

9 hours ago, Captain Scarlet said:

Weather here in SW Ireland the last few months has been terrible, and tonight has been my first more-than-a-moment session since the end of August. I've just come in from finally having taken advantage of Jupiter's altitude these days, and although I observed only Jupiter, it's been one of my more memorable sessions. I  had it in my diary as Europa & Ganymede double transit (thanks @Simon128D ) with shadows to follow plus GRS in prime position. I saw it all, though I did have to drag everything back in hurriedly while a violent squall came through.

I had my LZOS 105/650 on SkyTee2, initiually tucked right under my East wall to shelter from the 60kph wind gusts (it calmed right down a little later). The LZOS has a weird finder-mounting bracket, and it was only a few days ago that I got around to sorting it out and attching a finder: my APM 8x50 RACI . It does make navigating a bit easier ! And I also finally attached my slo-mo extensions(after 2 years of ownership), and they too make life so much easier. I mainly used my Ethos 4.7 to give me 138x.

I saw Ganymede and Europa approach and merge with the disc, while simultaneously Io disappeared around the back on the other side. At one stage there were three bright white pimples attached to Jupiter's disc. Once the two moons were in fornt of the planet, they disappeared from view, I couldn't make them out against the bright disc. But the rest of Jupiter was far better than I've ever seen him before, lots of detail and subsidiary bands, and for the first time (for me) the GRS was RED! Amazing. Then the squall came and I rushed everything back inside.

An hour or two later, all was clear again, so I quickly got it out again to see if I could discern any shadows. I could! And what's more, Ganymede had turned into a silhouette: I could see one sharp tiny black shadow, and Ganymede as a slightly less dark but nonetheless distinct disc.

So: double transit, GRS as red, lots of detail, a shadow and a silhouette. A wonderful short double-session.

As I write shortly after packing up, there's now heavy hail drilling against the window. I was lucky!

Cheers, Magnus

 

before the squall:

 

second session after the squall:

Brilliant read, you're excitment is obvious. Glad you got to observe the event. I missed it due to the stormy weather not passing until near 1am. 

It's moments like these is what makes the hobby/way of life, so rewarding and creates the craving for that next thrilling moment at the eyepiece. 

Had another go at Mars on this stormy night with poor conditions. 

Took 180 second capture and end result is best 25% giving me 10k frames to stack. I was going to Shift + Delete the whole capture as the stack from AS3 didn't look so good but after a play in Regi it wasn't too bad. 

At least I got the polar clouds and you can just about make out Olympus Mons - I think. 

Well, looks like I am going to miss it due to awful weather hitting us that day. 
Tonights Io transit will do nicely, expected to be clear and a hole in the jet stream so hopefully some better than average seeing to allow for barlowed imaging. 

Let's hope so! There is another double transit a week or so after this but Jupiter will be long below the horizon before the tranist completes, so this might be the best show we have for the rest of this year. 

Almost a repeat of the incredible doubel transit of October 26th. 
We have Europa and Ganymede, almost lined up together with Europa's shadow appearing first then, much later, followed by Ganymede. 

Here are some grabs from Stellarium with time stamps

Start

Here's hoping for clear skies!

Nothing special here but having battled with terrible seeing through the entire specitcal I was able to get something to work with near the end. This is my best result but it was 10 times more rewarding to take it in visually.

I've no idea how you managed to combat the terrible seeing to get such fine results. 

I have had mine now for a few years and love it. It's so much better than the hand controller. The app could do with some polish and can not work at all on newer Android versions but I kept my Samsung S8 and HTC One as hand controllers for the dongle and those work great, with GPS on the phones working as you want it so. You also get the luxery of 3 star aligment for Alt Az GOTO as well. I use my dongle on my EQ6Pro and 350P FlexTube GOTO. 

I've a C11 as well and yes, when the seeing is poor its very challenging to use but you got very good results there. I really like your Mars 

It unexpectedly developed clear spells last night and as I was getting ready for bed I looked out and was stunned by the the stable seeing. Also knowing there was no jet stream I just had to go out. I was setup by 23:10. 

Of course when I got onto Jupiter it clouded over but after paintently waiting 20 minutes I was rewarded. 
I deceided to try and captire in RAW 16bit this time and knowing the conditions were good I screwed on the barlow to the ADC to give me 1.5x. 

I could instantly see how nice it was. Not brilliant, but still very good and knew I was in with a chance of getting a decent result. 
I know that 16bit is a slower fps but even still, at 1024x768 with am exp of 4 and a gain of 320 I was getting 128fps on average. I totally forgot that when going into RAW16 it disables "High Speed", so when I switched back to RAW8 I couldn't understand why my fps wasn't going back to the 200-300fps I usually get but I just ran with it as I knew my window of time was short. 

All in all I am very happy and is easily my best image yet. With hindsight I should have dialed up my settings to maybe exp of 5 and gain of 350 as in processing I was getting a lot of those funky compression artifacts around the noth pole. Shame but something to remember next time. 

My best result was a 140 second exposure and did two stacks with 15% best and 40% best with the 40% giving me much more detail and scope to work with in registax. The resulting stack was 10k frames. 

I went numb when I saw that I got suface colour and tones on Callisto. I never thought I would achieve such a feat and now I want to add a good 3x barlow to the collection to have for the next night with good seeing and the moons are close. 

There is a lot of noise and I can still see issues in the north but I suspect those were bad exposure choices on my part. 

Equipment: 

CPC1100
ASI290MC 
ZWO ADC
Meade 2x Barlow - barlow piece attached to the ADC to give 1.5x, or there abouts. 

AS3 and Registax for processing. 

Here is a bonus Mars. I hoped to get some good captures of this but when I got centred on it light could already covered it and by 20-30 seconds into my capture thick cloud rolled in and ended play. I had a good at a stack anyway and this was only a few hundred frames. 

That's a lovely result of one of my favourite Hickson groups to observe. I had the pleasure of seeing the Arp arms of that galaxy at 23:00 with averted vision in my 16" and a vaugest hint of the dusty lane on the centeral galaxy. 

Lovely image to my eyes. 

Fabulous stuff. I was praying for it to be clear, so I could get the C11 on it, but the depressing weather never let up so I reside to sulking about it and go to bed early. 

That's excellent! Thansk again. In plain sight when you know where to look.

Ah thank you, I did not know about "limb darkening" I shall try that next time. 

Thought I would give this WinJUPOS software a go, after hearing so much about it. 
Thanks to a few excellent YouTube videos on how to use it I found it was very easy to use. 

The plan I had for the 22nd was to do a full capture of the GRS rotation. It started of with terrible seeing but slowly got to - what I would call - okay seeing. Sadly by 22:45 the cloud came in and blanketed so ended my night as the GRS was just reaching mid point. 
It dawned on me, just the other day, that I would have gathered enough data on that run for a good attempt at derotation. 

Equipment:
CPC 1100 was used at stock FL (as seeing was too poor for a barlow)
ZWO ADC
ZWO ASI 290MC

9x caputres between 20:27 up to 21:37UT 
100s catpure at 3ms Exp with 255 Gain, giving a frame rate of 303fps

I typically stack my best 40% of frames, which on average gave me stacks between 10,000 and 15,000 frames. I did also do stacks at 10 and 20% but found processing much easier with the higher stack count. 

This is the final result after derotating in WinJUPOS. There is some funkyness around the edges of the planet disk but that could be down to the lack of barlow and thus lack of detail/resolution for the software to work with, or I didn't get enough hours of data. For my first time trying though I am thrilled by the results. 
 

This is an orginal frame from the stacks, processed in Registax, the results are quite noticable I think. 

I am very much looking forward to trying this again, hopefully with 3-5 hours of data and may push to 120-150 second captures. 

23 hours ago, Kon said:

I gave up imaging last night and did some DSO observing as transparency was very good.

An excellent decision. That was my plan too until it started to pish down like there was no tomorrow. 

Yep, it's so difficult to work with the planets when the jet stream is just screaming above our heads. I often find it near on impossible to know if I am properly focused or not. I usually just resort to visual enjoyment at the eyepiece in such conditions. I also quite enjoy how a UHC filter really enhances the view of Jupiter and Saturn visually in poor conditions. 

I got my best view of the cat's paw toady. It took almost all of my best equipment to do it but it paid of 🙃