Mars - 18th March

[hayju01]

Seeing was the best for ages, even from my LP front garden. OTA had 2.5 hours cool down so no question of that causing a problem. PA's and then drift aligned....WOW! what a difference that made! My last few sessions had been dogged by bad tracking in one instance less than 1 minute but last night i was easily getting 3 minutes on more attempts (I think PE was affecting others, job for another time). All set up by 10.15pm and decided to do a bit of visual as the seeing was good M81,M82 and couple more...then on to Mars. Oh and threw in a star test in there some where no collimation issue on my scope :-) My new Dielectric Diagonal made such a difference too.

Right down to imaging all set and ready to go by 11pm roughly when Mars was due to reach its max elavation. On screen image was rock solid at F10 so immediately bumped up to F25 and still solid, grabbed a few avi's result of one below then thought what heck lets push it F50...well it was back to F25 very quickly :-)

So here's one image F25, DFK21, 60fps, processed in RS6 with a 'reilgn with processed' thrown in for good measure, about 3000/10000 stacked.

Pretty sure thats cloud cover i'm seeing rather than artifacts and while it definately needs some more work I'm pleased with it so far.

Any comments or suggestions most welcome.

Thanks,

Justin

[Asimov]

Nice work, Justin. Couple of thoughts here; You are using that diagonal to image with? If so I wouldn't be..

How did you debayer your 60 FPS AVI?

You describe the seeing as pretty good. Reckon F40 would be good in these circumstances with your scope.

[hayju01]

Nice work, Justin. Couple of thoughts here; You are using that diagonal to image with? If so I wouldn't be..

How did you debayer your 60 FPS AVI?

You describe the seeing as pretty good. Reckon F40 would be good in these circumstances with your scope.

Thank you. So thats one thing I realised when I packed up, I'd left the diagonal in (the new dialectric) DOH!!!

Yes I did debayer the avi's.

I thought I should be able to go higher than F25 and when I tried my x5barlow but it was really bad and I could have stacked two x2barlows but they're not the best barlows in the world and I've been caught out before with trying different combinations of Barlow always trying to get a better image and so often ended up with very few if any useable avi's. I do plan on getting a decent x4 Barlow so I might bring that plan forward a bit.

Thanks for your comments,

Justin

[Asimov]

Well Justin, you COULD use that diagonal in the imaging train (after the barlow, using it as an extension tube to up the scale) but make sure the scope is collimated WITH the diagonal there. It's not the done thing but I've done it plenty of times & it works. A lot depends on the diagonal itself. I ended up having to actually collimate the thing because the mirror wasn't sitting perfectly in it's housing. Sometimes it's not worth the hassel.