Another Saturn with the 127 Mak

[lee allen]

mint pic!! cant wait to try my sw auto focuser out! good times are callin!

[JamesF]

Interesting, I'd been doing just 90 seconds for fear of rotation blur (the tutorials I watched mentioned 90-120 seconds - though that was for Jupiter). I'm now confident I can get even better results next session, which I plan to try on Mercury as well. Just hoping the weather turns fair again no later than wednesday...

Jupiter and Saturn appear to have similar periods of rotation. Saturn being smaller and further away, I'd guess you can push the imaging period further. I'm sure it must be possible to work out a reasonable maximum on a per-planet basis, but my head isn't up to it at the moment.

Even without knowing what the maximum reasonable period is, you could always go for a "binary chop" approach. Take, say, 8 minutes worth of video at 10fps and stack it. Then try stacking the first half and second half, then quarters, and see how it looks in each case.

I really *must* get the motor drive connected up on my mount so I can give it a go myself...

James

[Notts star]

Great pic of saturn lots of detail ...........

[Revs]

Very impressive by anyone's standards, but for a budget scope!..

Can't wait to have a go myself. I've only seen Saturn through the Dob so far.

[Jarvo]

Fantastic detail. Hats off for getting so much detail with 127 mm of aperture.

[Eclectic_Mixer]

Well done Alan, did you let Saturn drift acroos the field or did you set the tracking going. I left the Mak tracking Saturn last week while I had a brew, with good intentions to image, I left it too long and it was behind a tree, DOH!. At least the scope still had it in view between the branches.

Geoff

[RikM]

That's a smashing image and something I am hoping to have a go at some time soon. It is good to see what is possible with a 127 and some finesse.

[MorningMajor]

Lovely image - that gives me something to aspire to!

Well done

[King]

Here's what I was able to do with your settings (same telescope). Not even close! Though out of that many frames I'm fortunate if I get a stack of 150+. Must be the vibrations of the balcony so maybe I should forget prime time now and wait for it to move round the house pre-dawn.

[Spikey]

Great pics Al.

[Amazing]

Here's what I was able to do with your settings (same telescope). Not even close! Though out of that many frames I'm fortunate if I get a stack of 150+. Must be the vibrations of the balcony so maybe I should forget prime time now and wait for it to move round the house pre-dawn.

did you use the extension tube like he did too?

could that be the big difference?

[King]

I didn't, hence the lesser magnification. But surely a smaller magnification should be more clear?

[RikM]

Focus / Colimation ?

[King]

Either of those are possible actually so I'm looking into that. Was thinking of getting an auto-focuser in the near future.

But now I've got Registax to stack better it could be something as simple as that or the histograms. You'll know I've fixed it when I start posting [insert amazing picture].

[beamish]

TBH , focus looks pretty good, if anything it's down to scale and pixel size. With a 2x barlow, the scaled image means that each pixel will have a smaller area of detail to pick out, you'd be utilizing more pixels hence a more detailed ,sharper looking pic.

But there's a limit- go too far in scaling and image quality starts to drop off due to less light hitting the CCD due to the longer fl which then means having to push on gain etc and end up with a noisier image.

I think !

[MorningMajor]

Posted my first attempts here

Not a patch on Alan's but at least it's a start!