2015 12 21 - Full disc capture. First light AVX mount.

[cathalferris]

Dusk yesterday evening was clear as a bell, so I hurried to set everything up for a quick test of the AVX mount and my control via Fire Tablet over wifi.

Aligned first by eyepiece, then did an ASPA, then aligned again and focused using the camera live view 10x zoom. A quick slew to the Moon after completion, and I started recording video. Seeing was marginal, I could watch the shimmering across the lunar disc on the camera screen.

After about 5 min of recording the clouds started to form in the upper reaches of the atmosphere as well as low clouds scudding across, and within 20 min I could no longer see any naked eye stars. Indoors, to processing and relearning how to do this again!

Here's the result:

Solstice Moon by Cathal Ferris, on Flickr.

Celestron Onyx 80 semi-apo, 500mm f/6.2, on my new Celestron Advanced VX mount, controlled via SkyFi and Fire 7 tablet. Canon 600D in zoomed 1:1 movie mode, 1080p@30fps, ISO800, 1/60 second shutter. Processed with PIPP to convert from .mov to monochrome uncompressed .avi, stacked and wavelets in Registax6, and a gentle curves applied in Paint.NET. I'm pretty happy with how it came out, first solar system astrophotography in ~9 months.

The original 1920x1080 file looks like it would make a half-decent background for an HD laptop..

[Astro Imp]

That looks very nice, well done for using the brief break in the clouds to produce a very pleasing image.

[knobby]

Nice, didn't realise the SkyFi worked with the ASPA routine

[Pete Presland]

A fine capture some very nice detail showing.

[cathalferris]

Nice, didn't realise the SkyFi worked with the ASPA routine

I did all the aligning and ASPA on the handset, only using the skyfi once I was aligned. I did have the skyfi on and connected, and skysafari pro 4 connected on the tablet, seemed to work fine in parallel.

Sent from my SM-G920F using Tapatalk

[laudropb]

Very nice lunar image.