First half decent efforts on Jupiter, 7th Oct

[Whippy]

I think I'm finally managing to get my head around doing solar system imaging, very different to DSO work! Windy old evening and I think I'm pushing the Skymax 180 on the EQ5 a bit, but it's doing the job .

The colour effort is on a Phillips flashed SPC 880, 894 frames from 1800. I think I made a bit of dropoff though as I ran the camera at 15fps instead of 10 so the data is probably compressed. Next time I'll make sure it's a 10 fps.

The mono is an I-Nova PLA-MX cam, same Sony 618 chip that's all the rage atm, but with the added bonus of a ST4 port at the back so you can use it as a guidecam . Having a few minor issues with it, mainly I can only run it at about 25 fps but I think that's my laptop rather than the software, a bit more testing required... 1905 frames out of about 3000 on this one.

All procesed in Registax 5.1 with a bit of touching up in photoshop afterwards.

Tony..

[beamish]

It's a reasonable start Tony & nice to see the can getting an outing. Look fwd to more :)

[Whippy]

Cheers mate . I think with a bit more time with Registax and better conditions there's a fair bit more to come from this.

Tony..

[Clayton]

Cheers mate . I think with a bit more time with Registax and better conditions there's a fair bit more to come from this.

Tony..

I think so too, but it's a very nice start

[blackparticle]

A good start but I agree, there's lots more to detail to be had from the 180.

Next up I'd try a barlow with possibly an extension tube to provide even more magnification. If you can get Jupiter filling the chip you'll extract a lot more detail, even if it appears a bit blurred and wobbly during capture. Registax will be able to sort a lot of that out and then you'll get the chance to shrink the image down in photoshop if reqd to tighten it all back up again.

The best results I've had from my SPC900 and Mak150 were actually in 320x240 mode running at 90fps (using Sharpcap). This led me to think that the cam was interpolating up to 640 x 480 but I may be wrong.

Alan

[Whippy]

Cheers Clayton .

Alan, I have tried using a Barlow on every session so far (these are the results from the 4th one so far) and it needs very good seeing to image at f30 and 5400mm focal length something so far, I haven't had. Unlike DSO imaging where steady skies can be to a point, be worked around using shorter focal lengths, solar sysytem imaging is completely at the mercy of the atmospherics. It's a completely different way of working, something which I'm trying to get my head around!

Tony..

[blackparticle]

What shutter speed have you got the cam set at?

If you can get the shutter as fast as possible (even if you're only at 10 or 15 fps) you might be surprised at just how much you can cut through the bad seeing. There will be a trade-off on the gain when doing this so there is a balance.

There's a Jupiter & Ganymede pic in my link from a couple of months ago if you want an idea of what the Mak150 and SPC can do under fairly poor conditions at f/48 - 7200mm fl.. It's not a prize winner that's for sure but I was quite impressed by how much better my images got by doing this.

Hope it helps.

[nightfisher]

nice one tony, gives me some thing to aim for with same outfit

[Tassydevil]

Nice work Tony.