Jupiter with 12" Dob - August 20

[Jusher02]

Hi. I'm having increasingly interesting results with my Skywatcher 12" Auto-tracking Dob. This is from last night when here in New Zealand Jupiter was at about 50 degrees altitude. I use a DMK21 camera (mono only for now, sorry - no filters used) and stacked the best 1900 frames, captured at 60 frames per second. Image scale is about 0.15 arc-seconds per pixel; the scope was operating at about f/25.

I never expected such a good result from a relatively inexpensive Dob; it's also incredibly versatile in that you still get all the "push to" fun with a moderate focal length (eg a 35mm Panoptic gives you about a 1.5 degree FOV). And it stores away in a very compact space. Nice!

Jonathan

[GazOC]

Great image Jonathan. The Dob looks like a real winner!!

[omneferuss]

A bit of colour would be nice ..but you'd have a hectic time of it with filters!!

NO you wouldn't it's a TRACKING dob! what'll they think of next?

Great to see! Keep it up

[Theninjagecko]

what causes the onion ringing?

[Jusher02]

I was asked for a bit of colour rather than mono - here's the result. It's the first time I've used filters to create a colour image, so I imagine my technique could do with some improvement. Still, I'm happy with this first effort

Jonathan

[rawhead]

Amazing for a first effort

The 12'' is certainly giving you plenty of detail

Cheers

Jon

[Kokatha man]

Very nice Jonathan, a bit more scale on a night of good seeing and those RGB images will be absolute pearlers....!

TNJ - there's all sorts of opinions on the cause of "onion rings" from "too much gamma" to "not enough gamma".....to "under/over exposure".....pushing wavelets in processing.....etc, etc....!

I find that if I keep gamma at around 35% and set my histogram at just under "full" that I have no problems with said.....and a good imaging take half-processes itself without any necessity to push any processing tools too much.....in fact, a good exposure on a night of reasonable seeing will have an image that "semi-processes" itself in Registax where lightness of touch with tools is the maxim.....

[omneferuss]

Whacko! really nice.. .. and no 'onionrings' in sight