Man i gotta get me 1 of these

[Baz Pearce]

Wednesday night was very clear. I finally talked my buddy into fetching over his Skymax 127mm Maksutov OTA. We setup to image the GRS 1st up. Missed the focus a bit on this run. Tough to focus it because of the blast of warm air past the scope when i open the balcony to reach outside adiing to the already disturbed air from 9 warm floors below me. Then waiting 30 seconds for it to settle. Anyway we did 3 captures of 7000 frames at 60fps, over a 7 minute period with the Philips and my 2X barlow. They were processed in PIPP then stacked in Registax5. Saving 1500+ frames. Kept at 100% image size. Upon close inspection i see a lot of extra background brightness from that bright full Moon being so close by.

We then went out for an hour's hike, under a clear not so dark sky. The Moon was way higher than the Sun ever gets. We headed back to my gaff to get some more captures of the end of the Ganymede transit.

Got the focus much closer this time. We took another 5 captures over about 12 minutes.

As a final exercise, i desaturated the 5 of the 2nd run and built a GIF for a short animation of the set.

Finished off with some Lunar captures. Will post them in that section.

Conclusions on the OTA. Is that it kicks my Astromaster's behind up and down the 10 flights of stair up to my flat on Jupiter. My only gripe with it would be the longer settling time after refocussing. I have a spare stepper motor though. Gonna attach it to the MAK next time and do the fine focus from inside with the dec buttons on my hand controller.

[sologuitarist61]

Great images - they are really good scopes aren't they?

[scoobee]

liking the images and well-done

[kirkster501]

Nice - I like

[Baz Pearce]

Great images - they are really good scopes aren't they?

You're bang on there Richard. Guess i need to start saving up some pennies. Chance of a session away from all this wavy atmosphere around my balcony tomorrow. If we can get the laptop going.

Baz.

[JamesF]

I didn't internalise that you were using 60fps with an SPC900 for the lunar shots I've just looked at Baz, but that's what you're doing here, yes?

I'd really avoid anything more than 10fps with the SPC900 to be honest (actually, I genuinely doubt it's even doing 60fps anyway). It's only a USB 1.1 device and there's not enough bandwidth on the bus there to do more than 5fps without compressing the data. There's a little compression at 10fps and after that it gets quite bad and you're probably losing a fair bit of data.

The seeing was pretty rough for most people on Wednesday by the looks of it, but I think you'll get more out of the camera if you bring that frame rate down.

James

[Baz Pearce]

James,

I've got to doing a bit of frame rate testing. I've put it in the imaging discussion section. http://stargazerslounge.com/topic/169768-testing-frame-rates-pipp-too/ because i got chance to add some Solar data also.

Baz.

PS. I bow to your experience lol. Just gotta get it into my thick skull to remember to change the frame rate when i jump from live broadcast to capturing.