My First Jupiter...

[AndyUK]

A lot of firsts for me this week - First Perseids, first light with my D40, first light with my home made dovetail for using D40 direct on mount (thanks to Steve Richards!) and now my first real attempt at Jupiter...

I know that this is nothing like most of the images on here as I "only" have a Toucam 840k (on a C100ED plus standard Skywatcher 2x barlow), and I know there's not even that much definition, but I was just chuffed to be able to see some banding! This was stacked in Registax using 500/2500 frames taken at 30fps.

Thanks for looking, but if anyone else has some Toucam shots or suggestions on exposure / settings, it would be greatly appreciated...

[ezza123]

That's a cool pic Andy, did you have a good go at changing the sliders when on the wavelet tab of RegiStax?

[rawhead]

I think the Toucam is USB 1.1

You should therefore not go to more than 10 frames per second. (I think)

Nice first shot, as per ezza123, the wavelets will bring out more detail...

Cheers

Jon

[rawhead]

seen this?

Planetary imaging with a toucam

[AndyUK]

Hi Ezza / Jon - Thanks very much for your comments and the Toucam link...

I must admit, I thought I might be pushing it a bit at 30fps (and yes, it is USB1.1). I've only ever really used it on the moon before (oh, and a couple of times trying to get something on Saturn a few months back and all I really got was a pale blue blob , so I decided that perhaps it (or I!) probably wasn't up to planetary imaging).

I used 15fps then, but the image looked so poor on the screen on Friday am that I thought a higher fps, more frames and only selecting the best 20% might get a better image - I didn't realise that whilst cranking up the fps I was compressing the image... So I won't be doing that again!

However, I also feel as if I've been found out by both of you here - Guilty as charged...!

I've heard a lot about the power of wavelets, but although the link says "This is the exciting bit!", whenever I've got to that screen my heart has sunk, as I hadn't the foggiest idea how to use it or what it was doing / supposed to do, and therefore I just skipped it with all the default settings (thinking I could "sort it all out" in Photoshop)

I now understand from that link what they do, so I need to rework from the original avi and then experiment with the sliders (even though the frames are probably so badly compressed!). However, I guess what I REALLY need to do is go right back to the very beginning again and take another avi (at 10fps).

(I just hope the long-range weather forecasters have got it wrong and we won't really have clouds and rain until November )

[AndyUK]

Well, it's a month later, but the clouds cleared and so did my workload, so I was able to get out again for another go at Jupiter with the trusty Toucam II 840...

I used 10fps using either 1/125 or 1/250s with 2000 frames and this time gave WxAstro capture a try (my first time ). In registax I then limited to 1000 frames and then took it down a little further to 900 for the final stack and applied wavelets (as per the guide that rawhead kindly pointed me to!)

I took 7 sets of frames and was pleasantly surprised with the quality overall as with one exception the 900 frames were between 95 & 97%, but to be honest, I think I can still improve on processing as they still feel a little bit "clunky"... although I think they're all certainly an improvement on the first one, so my thanks to everyone for all the help / pointers...