Luna Landscapes - April 18th

[Roy Foreman]

It has taken me several days to process these. Hope the effort makes them worth looking at !

16" F/4.5 Reflector

ZWO ASI 183 MM

15% of 900 frames at 19 fps

Processed in Autostakkert and Photoshop

Close ups taken using Baader FFC at 3x mag.

Now to start work on last night's data !

[WestCoastCannuck]

Very nice.  Some great details and contrast in there!  The first three would make a good mosaic!  Microsoft ICE is super easy and intuitive as well as free - if you don't have a program.

 

Cheers

 

Mike

[garyscott]

Beautiful, just beautiful. Kudos.

[Wout]

just wow and WOW!!!

very beautiful!!!!

i hope some day i get there to with that quality.

 

took mine with eos 450d

[Roy Foreman]

7 hours ago, WestCoastCannuck said:

Very nice.  Some great details and contrast in there!  The first three would make a good mosaic!  Microsoft ICE is super easy and intuitive as well as free - if you don't have a program.

 

Cheers

 

Mike

Thank you Mike,  yes I do intend to join the images together eventually but with 6 consecutive clear nights I have so many images to process I'm getting a bit behind ! I usually use photoshop but I will give Microsoft ICE a try - anything to make life easier. Thanks for the tip and glad you like the images. Two more nights worth on their way !

[Roy Foreman]

7 hours ago, garyscott said:

Beautiful, just beautiful. Kudos.

Well that is praise indeed !  Thank you so much and glad you like the images.

[Roy Foreman]

7 hours ago, Wout said:

just wow and WOW!!!

very beautiful!!!!

i hope some day i get there to with that quality.

 

took mine with eos 450d

You will get there eventually.  There is no magic involved.  Mostly we are at the mercy of the atmospheric seeing.  It is mostly a case of being very careful with focussing, and waiting for those moments when turbulence eases before starting the imaging run.

You have done well with your 450D - nice to see a sequence of the waxing moon. Keep at it and thank you for your comments.

[CraigT82]

Very nice Roy, so much fine detail to see and a really nice 'HD' feel. Are you usign the full size of the 183 sensor for these? 

[neil phillips]

Some good detail on those Roy 

[Roy Foreman]

3 hours ago, CraigT82 said:

Very nice Roy, so much fine detail to see and a really nice 'HD' feel. Are you usign the full size of the 183 sensor for these? 

Thank you Craig and yes I am using the full sensor area, and I have to say it can be a real pain !  This is a 20 megapixel camera with tiny 2.5 micron pixels. The frame rate is a pedestrian 19 fps at best, but the real problem is that there is so much data produced that a conventional spinning disc hard drive just can't cope. I had to buy an external solid state drive, and even then I still get plenty of dropped frames. An evening's imaging can easily produce half a terabyte of data, which takes 12 hours to process, even with a modern high end laptop. Autostakkert takes 40 minutes to stack each file.

The upside is that the resulting images are pretty decent, limited only by the muppet at the helm !

glad you like the images

[Roy Foreman]

1 hour ago, neil phillips said:

Some good detail on those Roy 

Thank you Neil !

[Roy Foreman]

Has anyone noticed the clenched fist near the top of image number four ?

[CraigT82]

1 hour ago, Roy Foreman said:

Thank you Craig and yes I am using the full sensor area, and I have to say it can be a real pain !  This is a 20 megapixel camera with tiny 2.5 micron pixels. The frame rate is a pedestrian 19 fps at best, but the real problem is that there is so much data produced that a conventional spinning disc hard drive just can't cope. I had to buy an external solid state drive, and even then I still get plenty of dropped frames. An evening's imaging can easily produce half a terabyte of data, which takes 12 hours to process, even with a modern high end laptop. Autostakkert takes 40 minutes to stack each file.

The upside is that the resulting images are pretty decent, limited only by the muppet at the helm !

glad you like the images

That Baader FFC is doing a great job of keeping the image sharp to the edges. With the f/4.5 diffraction limited field diameter of 6mm (at x3) and the full sensor diagonal of 15.8mm I would expect a blurry mess at the edges but they actually look great! What an interesting bit of kit. 

[Roy Foreman]

7 minutes ago, CraigT82 said:

That Baader FFC is doing a great job of keeping the image sharp to the edges. With the f/4.5 diffraction limited field diameter of 6mm (at x3) and the full sensor diagonal of 15.8mm I would expect a blurry mess at the edges but they actually look great! What an interesting bit of kit. 

Yes Craig, that Baader FFC (Fluorite Flatfield Converter) is an impressive bit of kit !  Not sure if you are familiar with it but Baader claim it to be the sharpest barlow you will ever use. Two of its four elements are made from real calcium fluoride so thermal shock can be an issue.  Its range of magnification is from 3x to 8x and it produces a flat field 90mm in diameter. It doubles as a field flattener when used with refractors and SCT's, and as a coma corrector with a reflector, and I have used it with a full frame sensor with no issues. It blows televue powermates out of the water !

All this comes at a price though. Take it from the cold night air into a warm house and it will damage beyond repair. It comes in an insulated box to protect it. And at current prices I expect it will cost around the £1000 mark. Not an item for the faint hearted !

[WestCoastCannuck]

17 hours ago, Roy Foreman said:

Thank you Craig and yes I am using the full sensor area, and I have to say it can be a real pain !  This is a 20 megapixel camera with tiny 2.5 micron pixels. The frame rate is a pedestrian 19 fps at best, but the real problem is that there is so much data produced that a conventional spinning disc hard drive just can't cope. I had to buy an external solid state drive, and even then I still get plenty of dropped frames. An evening's imaging can easily produce half a terabyte of data, which takes 12 hours to process, even with a modern high end laptop. Autostakkert takes 40 minutes to stack each file.

The upside is that the resulting images are pretty decent, limited only by the muppet at the helm !

glad you like the images

I feel your pain with the 183!  I also have a couple nights data to go through.    And yes...  AS!3 takes forever....  BUT, there is a fix!   Yes!  ---> Preprocess with PIPP.   What I do is before I go to bed on imaging night,  I plug ALL the SER files into PIPP in batch mode.    I set it to quality sort to a more manageable number.  It crunches away for hours while I sleep,   (I go with 520 frames from 2000, 3000, or 10000 - yes, I mix cameras too!)  THEN I run through AS!3.   It has made a world of difference for me.  This trick is totally credit to my good friend and mentor,  Marty Wise.

I get abysmal recording at full disc.  I do all my work straight to my external SSD.  At best I get about 12fps.  What works best for me is to scale it down a bit...  then take an extra panel or two - Brings my speed up to 20-30fps.    UNLESS I am squeezing the moon in one frame, then I just live with it..

Try the PIPP... once you have settings where you want them (quality,  output, etc..)    save the "options" and just open it up ready every time.   It makes the whole time thing MUCH easier to manage.

 

Cheers

 

Mike

Edited April 22, 2021 by WestCoastCannuck

[Roy Foreman]

Thanks very much for that info Mike - I will give it a try !