First take on Mars

[BGazing]

09 nov 2022, iffy seeing, windy, Mars was jumping around. Still managed to grab a couple of 6-mins videos, here's a 17perc stack of one of them. C8, ASI 678, ADC.

[geoflewis]

That’s lovely, a very natural looking Mars.

[Kon]

Great Mars with nice details.

[BGazing]

1 hour ago, geoflewis said:

That’s lovely, a very natural looking Mars.

Thank you. R6 auto RGB balance does not work well on it, at least not with ASI 678, i adjusted to colors that I normally see in the EP. A rather big polar cap, to my surprise.

[imakebeer]

Nice pic, certainly puts my own first effort (also on the 9th Nov) to shame! As mentioned above, it looks very natural. I'm encouraged though to see what's possible with the right gear and skills 👍

Interesting point about the RGB balance, something to look into - did you process this pic in Autostakkert and Registax?

[BGazing]

3 hours ago, imakebeer said:

Nice pic, certainly puts my own first effort (also on the 9th Nov) to shame! As mentioned above, it looks very natural. I'm encouraged though to see what's possible with the right gear and skills 👍

Interesting point about the RGB balance, something to look into - did you process this pic in Autostakkert and Registax?

Thank you, but please do keep perspective. I checked your effort and it is commendable for a 70mm refractor  and a DSLR. I know that it made huge difference when I started using C8 after initial test run with a 100mm refractor (doublet). Unless it is a triplet colors will be out of whack. R6 does well with auto RGB on Jupiter, less so on Saturn and Mars was (when I hit auto) very bluish. Combining visual with photo is great because one then approximates color that is seen visually, instead of going for something that is just not there.

Also, seeing is key. First time I was out with C8 just to test camera, it was a complete MUSH. I could see that playing with wavelets hints at literally a mass of data underneath. Once the seeing cooperated you can do wonders with a relatively affodable C8. I'd say that for planetary 200mm is very convincing. I use Evolution mount. Still amazed at how modern cameras and software crush any problems with tracking and seeing.

FYI the above image was 17 percent stack of 6 minute video running at 240FPS, so over 70000 thousand frames. I can only imagine what it would have done in some decent seeing.

[imakebeer]

44 minutes ago, BGazing said:

Thank you, but please do keep perspective. I checked your effort and it is commendable for a 70mm refractor  and a DSLR.

Sure, right now there's a chasm between my gear and yours - I'm realistic about that, but seeing what's possible makes me more positive about upgrading.

 

46 minutes ago, BGazing said:

Unless it is a triplet colors will be out of whack.

Yeah, this was something someone on CN pointed out to me. Interesting points about RBG in R6, I'll have to revisit my Mars images - I won't get the detail but I wonder if the colour tones are in there.

48 minutes ago, BGazing said:

FYI the above image was 17 percent stack of 6 minute video running at 240FPS, so over 70000 thousand frames. I can only imagine what it would have done in some decent seeing.

Also interesting to note you're using more than 20x the number of frames as me. My 450D is only doing about 25FPS! My Nikon is a bit better in this regard but maybe not so suited overall to the task.

Interesting point about dedicated astro cams - I only frequented CN briefly but one chap there did point out to me some tests he'd done and found that although his 700D did far fewer FPS there was far less noise than the astro cam so he could get away with far fewer frames.

[BGazing]

1 hour ago, imakebeer said:

Sure, right now there's a chasm between my gear and yours - I'm realistic about that, but seeing what's possible makes me more positive about upgrading.

 

Yeah, this was something someone on CN pointed out to me. Interesting points about RBG in R6, I'll have to revisit my Mars images - I won't get the detail but I wonder if the colour tones are in there.

Also interesting to note you're using more than 20x the number of frames as me. My 450D is only doing about 25FPS! My Nikon is a bit better in this regard but maybe not so suited overall to the task.

Interesting point about dedicated astro cams - I only frequented CN briefly but one chap there did point out to me some tests he'd done and found that although his 700D did far fewer FPS there was far less noise than the astro cam so he could get away with far fewer frames.

I only started very very recently, in July. A friend convinced me to try his guiding cam in my Lunt...and here I am. Doing planets since August, I reckon. You actually buy cam once you settle on particular gear. For planets, I'd say going SCT is an easy choice and then a 2-micron camera like ASI 678 is the easiest solution and does not require any barlow. It is difficult to get decent image scale on planets unless you get at least a C6. C8 is better and C11 even better if you have the mount and typical seeing to support it.

I was actually surprised how easy it is. Solar too. Most of it is about seeing and then you can get a hang of a few processing tricks. Mastering it is still beyond my skills, but when you get nice seeing session you really need not be a wizard. Consider this Jupiter I shot recently (am yet to complete a rotating video, too many shots to process). It's just that seeing was good. When it is bad, I cannot fix it, no way.

 

[BGazing]

Here's the same thing, processed with 1.5 drizzling just for the fun of it and somewhat more aggressive processing.