Lunar mosaic QHY5L-ll 1st light March 27th

[Space Cowboy]

First light with the QHY5L-ll mono at f5 and 20 odd degree elevation. Passing clouds finally stopped me after 15 mins so did not get the full disk but just a quick practise. Quite encouraged by this session considering less than ideal conditions. Shot at full 1260x960 resolution.

This is 50% scale :

[Space Cowboy]

Damn, just seen one pane is out of line bottom left. Will have to repro.

[todd8137]

Hi there i have a dmk 21 mono,i also have a qhy5,with the looks of things the qhy5 does a good job as a moon can great image

pat

[ilove1995]

Very nice image you have there.

[Stephen Green]

Thats a very nice image Stuart

Stephen

[Space Cowboy]

Hi there i have a dmk 21 mono,i also have a qhy5,with the looks of things the qhy5 does a good job as a moon can great image

pat

This cam has the same sensor as the ASI120MM Pat with 30fps at max res and 107fps at 640x480. Early days yet as I need to try out some long fl shots with the 5x powermate.

Thanks Stephen & Ilove!

[JamesF]

Very nice image. Shame the clouds intervened. I must learn a lesson from this if I do a lunar mosaic: Start with the terminator

James

[todd8137]

There may be a break in the clouds tonight lets see if we can get one

Pat

[todd8137]

This cam has the same sensor as the ASI120MM Pat with 30fps at max res and 107fps at 640x480. Early days yet as I need to try out some long fl shots with the 5x powermate.

Thanks Stephen & Ilove!

well 640x480 is some max res get on it. Should look great look forward to it gonna have a play tonight my self

pat

[neil phillips]

Hi Stuart congrats on first light. Does field rotation affect large mosaics for you ? There is a touch of what looks like missalignment. I assume you used I merge. you do let i merge align the image dont you ? When i first started i was doing it visually. I found its harder that way. Alignment can be a real headache on increasing numbers of panes. When the moons high, you should get some crackers with this cam

[SnakeyJ]

Stuart,

Very encouraging first light on the QHY5L-II mono (I'm down to buy one of these myself in a week or so) and its nice to see excellent results given a very short period of capture and less than ideal conditions. We really have to seize any opportunity that comes along at the moment - but hopefully you'll get a few more gaps in the clouds over the Easter weekend.

What software were you using for the capture and how were the frame rates like at full resolution?

[Space Cowboy]

Thanks for your comments guys. You could be right about field rotation Neil the tracking was playing up and I took 3 panes in the same place though a few minutes apart so this could be the reason for the mis alignment as I can't get it straight. I have auto align correlation selected in IMerge i'm not aware of another auto align method?

Thanks Jake I used EZ Planetary to capture. I have issues getting the full frame rate and although live capture showed nearly 30fps the avis which were 1000 frames each were over 1 min long which means only 15fps. The QHY cam is a lot more resource hungry compared to my DFK. I did a comparison using firecapture and the QHY was drawing 90-100% CPU compared to the DFK using 40-50%. It does appear my netbook is struggling to give the cam full speed.

[sologuitarist61]

Great image Stuart!

[SnakeyJ]

Thanks Jake I used EZ Planetary to capture. I have issues getting the full frame rate and although live capture showed nearly 30fps the avis which were 1000 frames each were over 1 min long which means only 15fps. The QHY cam is a lot more resource hungry compared to my DFK. I did a comparison using firecapture and the QHY was drawing 90-100% CPU compared to the DFK using 40-50%. It does appear my netbook is struggling to give the cam full speed.

Thanks Stuart - and interesting comparison with the DFK, though this is kicking 60 FPS at 640x480 and the QHY5L-II is 1260x960 or roughly quadruple the data rate. It could be a USB driver issue with the netbook, though not sure why the CPU is taking such a big hit, though disk buffering may also be an issue if the IO is struggling to keep up. Might be asking a lot from a netbook, dependent on generation. I've got an older laptop that I use for capture with a new SATA3 hybrid disk which is great for the IO and capture, but with a dual core AMD processor quite painful for post processing - I only have this luxury as a client was throwing it out! I use my proper Laptop (Think Pad i5) for stacking and processing as it is just so much faster.

I've seen some screenshots for EZ Planetary, but haven't used it to date - kind of hoping that Firecapture will handle this reasonably well as I've got quite a good routine/familiarity now with this. However, not too old or set in my ways if EZ Planetary offers better performance or supports features not currently available in firecap!

Still quite early days driver wise - so will be interested to see how performance increases and keeps pace with the ASI120MM - nothing like some perceived competion to spur QHY and ZWO to optimise drivers/performance.

[theo]

Good to see you get first light with the new cam Stuart and interesting to hear your initial thoughts. A very nice lunar mosaic by the way. Looking forward to more images to come.

Regards,

Pete

[Space Cowboy]

Thanks Richard.

Cheers Pete yes the real test will be with Saturn though my prime reason for getting this cam was for Lunar and Solar imaging but if it performs well on the Planets a filter wheel will be on the cards.

Jake I compared the 2 cams using 640x480 on both. Firecapture is much heavier on system resources than EZ Planetary using 1.6 of the 2 gigs of RAM my netbook has whereas EZ only uses 700 MB and about 70% CPU. Fcapture has far more options and for sure is the premier program if the computer has enough juice.

[stellawolf]

Super image wellm done

[planetdnb]

great mosaic work there!