Where Have I Gone Wrong?

[Stub Mandrel]

I made the mistake of changing lots of things at once last night, and was rewarded with pretty useless results:

With x2 Barlow

With x5 Barlow

Can anyone suggest what is likely to be the reason from looking at the image (PIPP, AS!2, Registax)

Light pollution - this was in the front garden, but my image of Saturn from 10 days earlier was hugely better than this.

Using tracking - to me this seemed to work very well, kept the image more or less in the right place and didn't seem to create any vibration.

IR filter in different place - Struggling with where to put the IR filter I moved it to the front of the webcam. This would have the effect of moving the webcam about 7mm further from the barlow lens.

Different Sharpcap settings - I tried changing the colour balance because of the obvious red cast.

Different computer - I notice this computer doesn't display images colour balanced very well compared to my desktop/old PC, but this shouldn't affect saved video...?

Using cheap x5 barlow - except that the results of using my x2 barlow were just as bad, and looking through the eyepiece it seemed OK.

Over Kitchen extension - possible that there was even a plume from a central heating boiler although the image looked steadier than usual.

Poor focus - I always worry that I am focusing badly, but never this badly before, and I spent ages getting the best possible on-screen images.

Bad seeing -- but the screen image was steady and the sky was clear (most of the time).

I'm no expert so I don't expect perfection, but the results from every single session I have had before (about 10) have been significantly better that this, with much more detail coming out on processing.

[Kropster]

Focus can be very difficult with the planet dancing around in the turbulence.

I use a Bahtinov mask to set focus on a star, then move to the planet.

Did you use wavelets in Registax to enhance detail?

[Stub Mandrel]

Focus can be very difficult with the planet dancing around in the turbulence.

I use a Bahtinov mask to set focus on a star, then move to the planet.

Did you use wavelets in Registax to enhance detail?

I'm p[retty sure there wasn't a lot of turbulence. i used registax (and tried Astra). My avatar is an example of what II usually get and I hoped to do much better now I could have thousands of frames instead of hundreds to choose from :-(

[Space Cowboy]

Looks weird. What cam are you using?

[Space Cowboy]

Oh and what scope?

[Stub Mandrel]

Microsoft HD Webcam and Skywatcher 150PL.

This is an example of what I have been getting before:

[SnakeyJ]

Almost certainly down to the seeing conditions and/or struggling to find focus.    The 150PL is F8/1200mm native - the 5x would give you F40/6000mm.   Even in exceptional conditions this is probably too much with the small pixels (3um?) on this camera.

[Stub Mandrel]

Near perfect conditions this evening. I have spent ages playing with sharpcap settings, and seem to have re-found a 'sweet spot' that reduces the noise. Spent ages focusing I knew things were getting better when I could see the red spot on the computer screen. I then tried out my homebrew bhatinov mask on arcturus - well it does make things easier. Got several 2-minute runs to compare:

Jupiter x1, x2, x5 (plus one run with manual focus at x2)

Lunar surface at x5

Lunar surface at x2 (which I KNOW will be good)

And I remembered a dark!

Saturn is up, but it will be an hour or more before I can point a scope at it, so time to try some processing.