My first moon pics with neximage and a C8 - What do you think ?

[Daz1969]

Hi all , Am pretty new to digital astrophotography and thought i would share my first two shots taken with a Celestron C8 and a neximage.Would like to get into some deep space stuff once experience and buget allow !

What do you all think ? Any advice is very welcome. Iam wanting to learn so dont be gentle

(click to enlarge)

(click to enlarge)

[michaelmorris]

Daz

Those are way better than my first attempts at lunar imaging. Well done.

How were they processed?

Focussing is very critical when imaging and can be particularly difficult when your target is not a point source (e.g. planets and the Moon). I'd think about investing in an electric focusser- it certainly helped my an awful lot.

[Daz1969]

Hi Michael , Thanks for your coments ! I just used the free registax 4 software and stacked the best 60 frames from about 100 taken. I origonally thought i had to get as many frames as poss but then i learnt that this leads to compression and so switched to 10 frames a sec instead of 30. Is this the right thing to do?

Cheers

Daz

[themos]

I don't know how right it is, but my best ever webcam result was with frames collected at 5fps.

[EA2007]

nice,

are you using any kind of barlow in that setup?

[narrowbandpaul]

i like the first one, the shadows give a real 3d feel

paul

[michaelmorris]

... I just used the free registax 4 software and stacked the best 60 frames from about 100 taken. I origonally thought i had to get as many frames as poss but then i learnt that this leads to compression and so switched to 10 frames a sec instead of 30. Is this the right thing to do?

Hi Daz

Yes, you are right - on the Toucam (because it uses USB1.1), at rates above 10fps the image compression gets noticeably worst. I use 10fps for 95% of my shots. If the seeing is exceptional (very rare in my location) I will try a duplicate capture at 5fps.

Personally, I stack the best 200 or 500 frames from 2000. This uses a lot of hard disk space and long processing times, but I find it worth the effort.

I would strongly recommend Martin Mobberley excellent book on Lunar and Planetary webcam imaging

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Planetary-Webcam-Patrick-Practical-Astronomy/dp/1846281970/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233526628&sr=8-2

and Bob Pilz's excellent article of lunar imaging in Selenology today

http://digidownload.libero.it/glrgroup/selenologytoday9.pdf

[Daz1969]

Thanks guys, i really appreciate the coments. I do have a barlow but never used it on these pics. My favourite is the first one.

Cheers for the link Michael,i shall be checking it out.

Daz