Mars and QHY5LII - first light

[leelee970]

I’ve put this in the “getting started” section as I really felt like I was starting right at the beginning of imaging planets.

I’ve recently bought a QHY5L II and have had to wait weeks to get a decent chance to use the beast.

In that time I’ve had several major problems. My laptop fell onto the floor of my observatory and now is held together with Gaffa tape. This prompted me to install a desktop – but loading all the software has been a real pain – I always seem to need to install “this or that” before installing the “other”; but finally the big night arrived last night.

With a cold beer in my hand I switch on all the kit, fired up C du C – only to find I’d not installed the driver for EQdirect (doh).

So out came my sorry looking laptop and quickly connected to the mount which dually tracked Mars.

I plugged the QHY5 camera into my desktop and fired up the QHY capture software EZplanet and wow it worked, Mars was bang in the middle. I decided to use Firecapture (for the first time). This really did give me a lot of control of the camera, but I need to learn what settings to use.

So here is the result from last night, not my best and certainly not a masterpiece but I was so pleased that I got anything at all.

Now all I need to do is sort everything out and learn how to use Firecapture.

Europa 8”, Heq5, X2barlow, QHY5LII.

Firecapter,AS!2, Registax5,Gimp – and a lot of luck.

If anyone has used Firecapture and can help/point me in the right direction for approx setting with a QHY5 I'd be forever grateful

Lee

[Notty]

im sat here now with my own QHY5L-11 fixed to mars and i'd be thrilled with results like that but all i get is a pink solid circle.  I'm playing around with the exposure/gamma etc but not getting anything like those colours or any detail at all.  are you using the RG debayer?