Rima Hyginus and Appenines, 30th

[Jupiterholic]

Couple more mosaics from last night.

9 panes for Rima Hyginus

and 12 panes for the Appenines. Quite pleased to capture the rille in Vallis Alpes

Both shot through a red filter using a 1.75x Barlow

[Mak One]

Excellent stuff! Rima Hadley too.

[Jupiterholic]

Rima Hadley too.

This is true. You can just about make him out if you squint Shame its going to be cloudy tonight. Hadley Rille would be a good target for my 3x barlow.

[ejwwest]

Excellent. Very detailed.

[Jupiterholic]

Thanks very much

[Rattler]

Stunning images.

[pixueto]

stunning images, and so detailed! I'm going to have a go and try lunar imaging for the first time hopefully tonight. Can you give me any advise as to settings, how long did you film with your webcam or each shot, tutorials on mosaics, etc? I intend to use a ultima barlow 2X, a philips SPC 880 and a SW200P.

Thank you

[Jupiterholic]

stunning images, and so detailed! I'm going to have a go and try lunar imaging for the first time hopefully tonight. Can you give me any advise as to settings, how long did you film with your webcam or each shot, tutorials on mosaics, etc? I intend to use a ultima barlow 2X, a philips SPC 880 and a SW200P.

Thank you

Hi there,

There are lots of tutorials for lunar imaging on the web but the best advice I can give you is to not try to push your magnification too much. The lower the magnification, the sharper your image will be. So try it with and without your 2x barlow and see which you like best.

Also don't expect an SPC webcam to be able to produce images as sharp as these here. Its chip isn't as sensitive as the DBK camera I use and it can't shoot at 30fps like my camera can without the image degrading massively due to compression.

Having said that an SPC is a fantastic camera to start lunar imaging with and is still leagues ahead of afocal imaging. I used an SPC900 for a year and captured some images I'm still very proud of.

If you're using Sharpcap try and push your gain quite high and keep your gamma quite low. Make sure you're very accurately polar aligned if you're going to use your 2x barlow as the smaller amount of frames you'll be capturing will mean you should try and film for about 2 minutes, then you should hopefully have a good amount of decent frames to work with.

Good luck and thanks for looking/commenting on my images.

[pixueto]

Thank you very much for your tips. I really appreciate it.

Well, this is what I got yesterday. I'm a bit disappointed as I went to great lengths trying to get the focus right but I think it came a bit out of focus at the end. Could that be a collimation issue? Any suggestions, comments or tips I would really appreciate.

Thanks

[ianaiken]

Even before the first image fully loaded on my screen you had me saying WOW!

[Jupiterholic]

Even before the first image fully loaded on my screen you had me saying WOW!

thanks!

[Jupiterholic]

Thank you very much for your tips. I really appreciate it.

Well, this is what I got yesterday. I'm a bit disappointed as I went to great lengths trying to get the focus right but I think it came a bit out of focus at the end. Could that be a collimation issue? Any suggestions, comments or tips I would really appreciate.

Thanks

Well, considering thats your first attempt at imaging the moon its a pretty good shot. Seeing definitely wasn't great last night. My own efforts from yesterday evening were softer than I'd have liked due to the seeing. You can see the shot here: http://stargazerslounge.com/imaging-lunar/183530-ptolemeus-straight-wall-1st-april.html

Astroimaging is the type of hobby that you only really get better at so don't be too down on yourself. If your focus was off, it doesn't look like it was very far off at all. You'll get the hang of that too. Try twisting in and out of focus several times each way until you get the feel for where the sweet spot is between the two. Usually takes me a couple of trys to get focus right. And I usually process my first capture straight away to see if I am in focus. Then I proceed with the rest.

You don't say how you took that shot... settings, magnification, software, length of capture, how you did the wavelets in registax etc.. so its hard to give any more advice. But I'd say your gain and gamma is very good as its not over or under exposed.

Keep practising, each capture you do will be better than the last. Unless the seeing conspires against you of course

[Moonshane]

spectacular images and I spotted Haley too, one of the best images of that rille I have seen I think. I have often tried to see the rille in Alpine Valley but no joy yet, I think I need to wait for the sort of phase you had to get good side lighting.

[Jupiterholic]

spectacular images and I spotted Haley too, one of the best images of that rille I have seen I think. I have often tried to see the rille in Alpine Valley but no joy yet, I think I need to wait for the sort of phase you had to get good side lighting.

Thanks. I don't think I've ever actually seen the rille in Vallis Alpes through the eyepiece. Don't think I have enough aperture for that visually not that I do a great deal of visual astronomy. But if the seeing is good and, like you say, the phase is right I'm picking it up most times I image it. Just. The best image of it at the moment has to be MikeD's version in his plato eyepiece projection thread.

[pixueto]

Thank you very much for giving up your time helping. I did not used any filter. For software, sharpcap and registax 6. To be honest, I only used the default settings for the stacking. These seem to give me good results with the planets. For the wavelets I used these settings:

RegiStax- Preview V6

which, again, it would normally give me good results for the planets but for the Moon I found them a bit too aggressive and I have to lower down a bit the percentage.

For this one, I also used the sharpen filter in Photoshop.

Thanks again for your help.

[Jupiterholic]

It'll be a combination of bad seeing and the fact that you're still learning about wavelets thats led to a soft looking image. But it is still a great start. You should be proud of it. Like I said, your capture settings look right. I don't think its a focus issue. I think you may have not captured enough frames to leave you with a lot of good seeing ones. The more frames you have, the harder you can push wavelets. How many frames did you stack and how many were in the original capture?

[pixueto]

The initial video was 1770 frames but since I left registax doing everything using the default settings, I don't even recall how many frames were left in the result! Maybe I should learn to use registax properly but, as I said the deault settings seemed to work fine with planets and once, a couple of months ago, while imaging Jupiter, I tried to select the best frame and have a say in the stacking process but the result wasn't so much different so I lost interest. Maybe I wasn't doing it properly.

I am using a SW200P, 1000 focal length, with an Ultima barlow 2X on a modded EQ5.

[Jupiterholic]

The initial video was 1770 frames but since I left registax doing everything using the default settings, I don't even recall how many frames were left in the result! Maybe I should learn to use registax properly but, as I said the deault settings seemed to work fine with planets and once, a couple of months ago, while imaging Jupiter, I tried to select the best frame and have a say in the stacking process but the result wasn't so much different so I lost interest. Maybe I wasn't doing it properly.

I am using a SW200P, 1000 focal length, with an Ultima barlow 2X on a modded EQ5.

Well my best advice would be to image without using your barlow lens to start off with. You'll find it easier to focus for one thing. And from a 1770 frame capture you want to aim for about 95%+ quality and try to be left with about 200 - 300 frames. Then gently work on wavelets manually/individually on those good frames.

Good luck.

[pixueto]

Working with the wavelets before stacking the frames? Thank you very much. I relly appreciate it your help. It's been very useful.

[Jupiterholic]

Working with the wavelets before stacking the frames?

No after stacking. You can't do wavelets until the frames have been stacked. But do wavelets yourself manually. Don't try and use the presets in registax. That way you can experiment and find the right settings for your taste.

You're welcome

[pixueto]

Thank you!