It's Mars Jim

[Stub Mandrel]

Well for the expenditure of over 30 gig of video, this was not an excellent result from last night (best 4% of zillions of frames stacked) :-(

[mikeDnight]

It looks good to me! If you show this to Stu you could be in for an award. 

Mike

[Davey-T]

I've got a pic' just like that except it's the street light overlooking my house 

Dave

[CraigT82]

That looks a lot like an image of Uranus I captured the other week (but obviously bigger and redder!)

I had the same flaring off to the side which kind of elongated the image. I chalked it down to rubbish seeing

[Stub Mandrel]

12 minutes ago, CraigT82 said:

That looks a lot like an image of Uranus I captured the other week (but obviously bigger and redder!)

I had the same flaring off to the side which kind of elongated the image. I chalked it down to rubbish seeing

That's my excuse too!

[CraigT82]

Here is my 'flarey' Uranus effort...!

[Stub Mandrel]

The Comet is Coming!

[Kokatha man]

<"It looks good to me! If you show this to Stu you could be in for an award. ">

<"I've got a pic' just like that except it's the street light overlooking my house ">

<"That looks a lot like an image of Uranus I captured the other week (but obviously bigger and redder!)

I had the same flaring off to the side which kind of elongated the image. I chalked it down to rubbish seeing">

Obviously some divergence in appraisals there..! 

I think from his original posting & subsequent response that Neil realises that this was not a good outcome...there are many factors that influence image outcomes including (but not limited to) scope, seeing, focus, collimation, elevation, size of target, camera, settings, experience etc, etc...

Being serious & trying to narrow down the "culprits" - apart from seeing (where elevation is an aspect) & focus I suspect that collimation might be the reason for the flaring...although if this was taken through a refractor this is much less likely...  

 

 

[Stub Mandrel]

It was poor focus (I couldn't find a star bright enough to focus on) and bad seeing - probably the worst I have tried to image in - most of the time Mars looked more like a fishing fly than a globe. Collimation may also be a culprit. It didn't help that I set out to image Venus, but thanks to Microsoft it took nearly half an hour for my laptop to complete booting up (after I discovered the battery was flat and found an extension lead) so by the time I got to it it was three overlapping RGB images flickering and flaring like a candle flame and impossible to focus on. I then had an important phone call and several less vital texts (which meant I had to keep running in to do various errands) so I wasn't in a great mental state for concentration and careful setting up.

I polar aligned by eye, quite well but had to do a few tweaks to keep mars centre frame, for some reason the damn mount was stuck at a high slew speed, which meant that centring was hit and miss creating lots of blank frames as it swung far from sight...

Finally stretching the avis was a poor idea, my new fan cooling arrangement meant that frames without a target in lacked bright noise, so PIPP stretched them too far and decided much of the speckled noise was a better quality image than my planet shots. I am going to try again without the stretch and see what happens. there must be a few hundred, if not a couple of thousand decent frames in 40+ minutes of video!

All in all I'm surprised I got anything...

[Pete Presland]

I think most of us have been down this road many times, especially if you live in the UK. The seeing conditions really are the most important factor, without them you are going to struggle. Mars at the moment is going to pretty tricky even in good conditions, at least poor data is easy deleted