Immaging, Whats Going On??

[Wetsparks]

Got myself out in the garden last night to try out some new kit and have a go at some imaging. Scope is a SW 150p. After having some fun gazing around I settled on Jupiter and plugged me Orion G3 colour ccd into the EP holder. On the laptop I was using APT for image capture and focus control. I must admit that the tracking was quite good considering I was only using the EQ5 software. I was getting sessions of 15 mins plus with no target movement at all. Anyhow, the first problem was that APT kept on dropping the link with the camera. Every time it did this I had to unplug the camera and plug it back in again to get it to work. Now I don't know if this is a problem with the camera or APT, any thoughts?

Next is the imaging itself. On a 1 second exposure Jupiter was blown out but I did get a nice picture with 3 of the moons in full view. I dropped down to 1/500th of a second and Jupiter was still blown out, but the moons were very faint. I next went to 1 thousandth of a second and Jupiter was still just a white ball but with no moons, but the thing here is that the image of Jupiter was a lot smaller by about half the previous size. Next I put a LP and Polarising filter on the camera and at 1/50th of a second Jupiter was back to it's previous size but still just a white ball and of course, no moons.

I think tonight I might give the Celestron NEX 5 a go to see what I can get, but in the mean time has anyone got some advice as to where to go now with the G3??

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Can't help with APT I'm afraid. To image Jupiter you'll need short exposure times as it is directly illuminated by the Sun and quite reflective, just like imaging a bright object on a sunny day here on Earth. Distant objects don't appear any dimmer (their surface brightness remains unchanged with distance), until they become so small that they can only be resolved as a point source. The smaller image you saw was its actual size, so you were closer to the correct settings at that point. It's difficult to capture Jupiter and its moons in a single exposure, unless you are using very high levels of magnification so that the moons are no longer points. I don't think you'll get any benefit from using an LP filter for planetary imaging.

Hope that is some help.

[ChrisLX200]

Sounds like some auto-stretching of the image was going on. If you open up the captured image you can look to see if it's saturated or not.by adjusting the Levels.

ChrisH

[Leveye]

You need to go about imaging the planets in a different manner. You need to take small movies of them at a high frame rate and low ISO and then take the frames of those and stack them. There are others that will chime in with the best way to go about this. There are many threads on planetary imaging. Congrats your well on your way!

[lensman57]

Got myself out in the garden last night to try out some new kit and have a go at some imaging. Scope is a SW 150p. After having some fun gazing around I settled on Jupiter and plugged me Orion G3 colour ccd into the EP holder. On the laptop I was using APT for image capture and focus control. I must admit that the tracking was quite good considering I was only using the EQ5 software. I was getting sessions of 15 mins plus with no target movement at all. Anyhow, the first problem was that APT kept on dropping the link with the camera. Every time it did this I had to unplug the camera and plug it back in again to get it to work. Now I don't know if this is a problem with the camera or APT, any thoughts?

Next is the imaging itself. On a 1 second exposure Jupiter was blown out but I did get a nice picture with 3 of the moons in full view. I dropped down to 1/500th of a second and Jupiter was still blown out, but the moons were very faint. I next went to 1 thousandth of a second and Jupiter was still just a white ball but with no moons, but the thing here is that the image of Jupiter was a lot smaller by about half the previous size. Next I put a LP and Polarising filter on the camera and at 1/50th of a second Jupiter was back to it's previous size but still just a white ball and of course, no moons.

I think tonight I might give the Celestron NEX 5 a go to see what I can get, but in the mean time has anyone got some advice as to where to go now with the G3??

Orion G3 is a long exposure  DSO imaging camera, for imaging the planets you need a fast frame capture webcam such as a QHY5 Lii or ASI 120 amongst others. I had the same fun with Jupiter and a 150PDS last month using an Atik 428 exc and a very short exposure,  the results were amusing to say the least. I have the same problem with all the imaging software that I use and the USB2 connections from time to time, just part of the game I am afraid.

A.G

A.G

[Owmuchonomy]

You need to take short movie files of less than 2 minutes. So a webcam, DSLR or if you sell your body parts a high frame rate planetary camera. For Jupiter I run my DSLR on EP projection in movie crop mode 60 frames per second at ISO 800. Stack in Registax 6. Process in PS.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk