Early days imaging Saturn

[BlueAstra]

Had another attempt at Saturn last Friday with a NexImage. I think I still have focus issues, and not enough frames. This was about 600 frames. I'm currently making a Bahtinov mask to try and improve the focus. Continuing to climb the learning curve!

I notice you can software mod the Neximage to take RAW AVI files, but in the instructions I saw said the max frame rate was 5fps. I usually use 20-30fps, so would 5fps be a problem?

[GazOC]

If you use 20-30 FPS then your images will be getting compressed and quality will be lost. Try 5 or 10 FPS at most.

[BlueAstra]

I notice some people capture 1000's of frames. Does this mean I should be looking at exposure times of 3-4 minutes at 5fps? I have to be careful with really long exposures in case I get image rotation with my Alt/Az mount.

[MidnightSun]

Very interesting thread. I just had first light with a Neximage last night, used 30fps, and got very similar results. Something new to play with... Will try lower frame rate next time....

[Taff]

Nice capture of saturn.When i have a go at saturn i use 10 fps.Mark

[Kokatha man]

I'm no more than a fairly new beginner.....but as I commented elsewhere earlier, there is a trade-off between the compressed images at higher framerates with the webcam type devices, and the fact that "seeing" seems to be more critical in many ways and higher frame rates have that ability to "grab" more of these better frames when conditions are less than ideal.....meaning much of the time....!

[samtheeagle]

Hope you don't mind if I join the party?

I managed to grab my first ever astro images on Thursday night (28th). Target: Saturn! They're certainly not much to write home about, but I'm still pleased with them as a first milestone...

I did a fair bit of experimenting as I was trying out the new Camera EP I acquired... It's basically a Trust Spacecam 380, at least that's how windows detects it... Although it's a CMOS device it has a large sensor, giving me 1280x1024 images @ 15fps.

This first image is running it at 640x480. It's not bad, you can see the rings passing in front of the main body... Just. I've just realised that I have neglected to record the number of images stacked. DOH! From memory I think it was circa 200.

The next image I went for the big one It's pretty fuzzy, I think I overdid the magnification with my 4X Imagemate here... It's picked up on some colour which the earlier one did not, but it's less well defined.

Like I said, I'm not going to win any awards with these, but they're a start, and I hope that I can only get better from here!

All of this was done with an unguided scope, so I was tracking by hand every few seconds during the captures . I hope that once I get some drive motors, and perhaps a focussing unit I can get much better images.

Defo still much to learn!

[BlueAstra]

Isn't Saturn great to view! Good picture. There's lots of people here with helpful advice. I think you may need to increase the number of frames (500-1000). Did you do any post-processing? The image looks a little dark, maybe it would benefit from a contrast boost. Did you check the white balance? I think there is usually more yellow.

[samtheeagle]

Yeah, I love t look at Saturn It's usually my first stop of a night, and then a quick last one before packing up at the end. It seems rude not to!

Those images are very rough and ready... Due to the manual tracking element I kept the avi captures down to about 10 seconds, so I only had ~300 frames to play with from the start. Then take into account the wodge of horribly blurred ones from where I adjusted the RA.

The only processing was the basic Registax work up for stacking. I'm a total n00b at all this so atm I'm just feeling my way, trying to get some kind of a work flow together.

It's great fun though (and a potential money pit!!)