Jupiter - Still Struggling

[SnakeyJ]

Really struggling to get anything worthwhile on Jupiter so far this year - rather disheartening as I've seen many excellent images already this apparition.   Despite five attempts and over 100GB of capture over 5 nights this is the best I've been able to capture at 1660mm f/l.

All my attempts at 3000-4600mm have resulted in total mush!

Hopefully I'm due a little luck with some improved seeing, but one big frustration so far

One of these days......

[neil phillips]

Hopefully you will get better seeing soon. But its a start at least. don't give in. just make sure cooldown and collimation are good. the rest is seeing

good luck.. The processing looks ok. could try darkening the sky background,

[si@nite]

Hi Jake Neils right the seeings not been playing ball lately, but we take the highs & we take the lows mainly the lows lol,but hopefully things will pick up soon!

[SnakeyJ]

Cheers Neil for the encouragement, but sad state of affairs indeed!   But sure that better conditions and results will come and forecast currently looking good for tonight and tomorrow evenings.     Some extra thick socks may increase my enjoyment!

No probs with cooldown, being permanently out in the obs - but did may me wonder about the dew heaters - perhaps I'm running these to warm.    Will try turning them right down or off for a spell tonight to see if it makes any odds.   I checked the collimation and gave it a little tweak at the start of the night.

Fair point on the background, though only a very rough WinJupos combine and quick touch in Gimp - I wasn't going to waste too much time on this set

[Steve Ward]

I'm pretty sure it's not you , the Jetstream has been over us running North-South for a while now and causing havoc seeing-wise .... 

http://www.netweather.tv/index.cgi?action=jetstream;sess=

[SnakeyJ]

Thanks Simon, certainly frustrating conditions but hopefully the patience will pay off in the not too distant.    Checking back on my results from last year, I was getting better results from the firefly!

Hopefully the weather will permit and I will have another good play tonight, and will experiment with some different barlows/extensions.   IR-PASS should help mitigate the effects of seeing so might help achieve some more useful focal length and give a better L channel.

[SnakeyJ]

I'm pretty sure it's not you , the Jetstream has been over us running North-South for a while now and causing havoc seeing-wise .... 

http://www.netweather.tv/index.cgi?action=jetstream;sess=

Cheers Steve,

Like this link and the forecast animation, looks like it might be getting better for all of us over the weekend

[neil phillips]

Cheers Neil for the encouragement, but sad state of affairs indeed!   But sure that better conditions and results will come and forecast currently looking good for tonight and tomorrow evenings.     Some extra thick socks may increase my enjoyment!

No probs with cooldown, being permanently out in the obs - but did may me wonder about the dew heaters - perhaps I'm running these to warm.    Will try turning them right down or off for a spell tonight to see if it makes any odds.   I checked the collimation and gave it a little tweak at the start of the night.

Fair point on the background, though only a very rough WinJupos combine and quick touch in Gimp - I wasn't going to waste too much time on this set

 I would def turn those heaters off. Heat of any kind is bad news for high res planetary . In a obs dew should stay put for a bit I would have thought. Not sure if you use a dew shield you will need one without a dew heater. I am currently using camping mats. really light, and cheap perfect.

[SnakeyJ]

 I would def turn those heaters off. Heat of any kind is bad news for high res planetary . In a obs dew should stay put for a bit I would have thought. Not sure if you use a dew shield you will need one without a dew heater. I am currently using camping mats. really light, and cheap perfect.

Thanks again Neil, dew heater definitely off tonight but there's fair breeze so I may have to leave the dew shield off.    I've put the Revelation 2.5x ED barlow aside, as I've not had a lot of luck with this.   The Revelation 5x seems to work well in very good seeing, but tonight I shall go back to my old trusty Baader 2.25x zoom + extension tubes - this should give me a fair range between 2600 and 3600mm focal length or F12.6-F17.6  to experiment with.     I think this also gives me a bit more infocus travel, so my focus position is not hard up against the minimum travel - the locking screw seems to push this out of focus when the focuser is racked tightly in but otherwise works well.

Won't be a long session due to work, but hope to find a reasonable f/l for conditions and get some better data - at least that's the plan

[Freddie]

I agree with the poor seeing comments but I'm not so sure that is the only issue. The background looks very noisy for what I assume is a reasonable number of frames per stack. How many per colour were stacked? There is also a black ring around the planet which could be due to cam settings or processing. You may therefore want to have a look at the cam settings. 

If you post up your cam settings, numbers stacked per colour and the individual images before combining in Winjupos it may help to give some more pointers. Hope that helps.

[SnakeyJ]

Thanks freddie,

Capture 6000 per channel, stack 1000 gain 950 exp 2-4ms.

Really had to push wavelets, hence noise and artefacts.

Much better results 2night tho

typed on my mobile with Tapatalk

[SnakeyJ]

Now that's a whole lot more like it - single channel ir-pass, stack 1500 of 6000, 950 gain 4.2ms.  FL 3800mm+ tbc.

Heater off and changed image train around the baader zoom barlow.   Stacks of data to sort and stack and a much happier bunny

[SnakeyJ]

Very quick and dirty process on my laptop screen - but great improvements from last night:

RGB - WJ Combine:                                  IR-RGB - WJ Combine:

      

Not sure if I can see any difference between the two, but this screen is dreadful - another look tomorrow.

Thanks to everyone for their encouragement and advice - I'm blaming the dew heaters for previous poor attempts.   Now at least I feel I can retire the firefly

[neil phillips]

Way to go Jake, what a big difference, I reckon you can push focal length even more if you can get these results more consistently. Do you think turning the heater off helped ? its great when things go the right way. it said rain cloud around here. yet its clear. looks stable too ouch. My laptop charger is going. ive ordered another. if I go silent and anyone asks about me, spread the word plz Jake. Great improvement. Just goes to show its always worth never accepting the mediocre but trying to improve what we are doing.

I wasn't sure if it was just seeing Freddie, which is why I said turn the heater off and just make sure cooldown and collimation are good. Guessing as always. But your right it is good to suspect everything. Especially if theres other issues besides seeing.

[Space Cowboy]

Excellent images Jake are these with the QHY5L-II?

[theo]

That's a great improvement Jake. Nice work.

Pete

[SnakeyJ]

Excellent images Jake are these with the QHY5L-II?

Thanks Stuart - certainly was the QHY5L-IIM + Baader filters, and all worked very well last night.   It took a long time to sort out the image train due to focuser travel.   Originally I had the focuser, fw, barlow, camera and this worked well with both revelation barlows.    However, I could not get enough in focus to use the Baader Zoom in this way.     I had to move the barlow in before the fw, and then had lots of problems getting enough extension out.   The end result looked hideously long, but once everything was clamped up it was surprisingly solid.

Firecapture Ephems reported f/l between 3400-4250, averaging 3800ish.    The end result is massively better than my recent attempts, but the seeing certainly wasn't great and it was pretty windy.     So I'm attributing most of the improvement to turning the heat off and some credit to the Zoom barlow, which just seems to work better.

Gain was set at 950 throughout, and exposures of 1.9ms for L, 4.2ms for RGB and 12.3ms for IR (using the PP742).   Conditions were clear so the frame rates were pretty constant 70-90 for a 640x480 ROI, using FC's dark frame subtraction and recording to SER.    Not quite sure why my IR's at 12.3ms recorded the highest frame rates - somewhat counter intuitive?

Plenty of room for improvement with better conditions and longer F/Ls.     Though need to tidy up the image train and, perhaps try the Rev x5 again.

[SnakeyJ]

That's a great improvement Jake. Nice work.

Pete

Thanks Pete - definitely a WIP, but certainly took a huge leap forward last night - 36GBs of reasonable data.   Now I just need to find some spare time to process it - looking to try the WinJupos video de-rotation, but looks like this will only accept AVIs so I may need to do some conversion.

[Steve Ward]

PIPP is what  you want for that methinks ... 

https://sites.google.com/site/astropipp/

[Space Cowboy]

Interesting reading your settings Jake your frame rate should be higher at that shutter speed, have you got live preview set at 5fps as this will help the performance. Personally I can't get above 50fps on FC but EZ Planetary produces 90-100fps at a slower shutter speed than your 1.9ms for L. 

What kind of noise level are you getting as I've been getting a lot at the full frame rate even at only 50% gain  and have reduced it to 20-30% with 50-60fps.

You say you've had trouble with focus, do you have the cam nosepiece attached as I could not focus without this screwed on with my Dob.

[cgarry]

Very quick and dirty process on my laptop screen - but great improvements from last night:

RGB - WJ Combine:                                  IR-RGB - WJ Combine:

      

Not sure if I can see any difference between the two, but this screen is dreadful - another look tomorrow.

Thanks to everyone for their encouragement and advice - I'm blaming the dew heaters for previous poor attempts.   Now at least I feel I can retire the firefly

Good result, though I personally think using IR as a Lum channel produces horrible unnatural images so I don't do it myself any more.

Rather than just blaming the dew heaters I think you would do better to take an engineering approach and debug the issue with a star test.  By using a defocused star the differences between bad seeing and tube currents are really obvious and you can try things like turning off the dew heater and actually see if it actually makes a difference.

Cheers,

Chris

[SnakeyJ]

Thanks Chris, the IR-PASS certainly provided best resolution, though appreciate that they won't give an accurate result or balance - just playing with the data on this and trying to push a little more out of my best set to date.

Good point on the star test to check the effects of the dew heaters - easy to test as everything is still connected and was simply turned off last night.     I've not experimented much with the heater tapes and the generally run at 3/4 power from the Astrozap controller - it would be quite nice to run these through an arduino with some dew point calculation.   This could control the four heaters with a simple scale factor set to adjust for each tape - subject to experience.

[SnakeyJ]

PIPP is what  you want for that methinks ... 

https://sites.google.com/site/astropipp/

Cheers Steve - I was on this already, getting no further with UT Codec but just trying again with DIB.     PIPP is a real swiss army knife and essential part of my pre-process on planetary, though just starting to discover delights of RAW colour processing from the DSLR.

[Virgoman]

Things are certainly on the up there Jake. You have nice detail coming through. Better luck than myself last night - was forecast to be clear here...extensive cloud the whole time I was out, hoping against hope...Then I stumbled and dropped the C8 onto soft grass thankfully! Tube is O.K. and corrector plate is O.K......collimation on the other hand...and I was, of course, unable to do a star test. I dread.....

Best regards,

Ralph

[cgarry]

Yes, the IR is usually so much better than the other channels and that is why there is so much temptation to use it as a Luminance channel.  It is always good to play around with techniques like this and come to your own conclusions, you might invent some amazing new technique in the process.

Getting to the bottom of tube currents can be a monumental task, especially with bigger telescopes.  With my C14 the star test looked like a washing machine at times, showing up the currents well.  To get them under control I ended up creating a radiator reflector foil scope jacket and a bespoke dew shield with fins instead of continuous material.  I would think that the open tube of your newt should be much better at reaching thermal stability!

Cheers,

Chris