My First Saturn! Too much red wine?

[Johnboy2011]

This is my first Saturn from about 2am. I tnink in my excitement of seeing galaxies and globs for the first time by the time I tried to grab Saturn with the webcam I had hit the red wine a bit too hard!

I spent ages trying to focus but just couldn't get it, do I need a Bhatinov? Maybe I had just let the dew get the better of me as I had been out from about 9pm.

This is the capture info:

[Philips SPC 900NC PC Camera]

Resolution=640x480

Frame Rate (fps)=10.00

Colour Space / Compression=YUY2

Exposure=-6

Brightness=70

Contrast=35

Saturation=29

Gamma=17

ColorEnable=255

BacklightCompensation=0

Gain=38

Please help!

John

Saturn 01-04-11.bmp

[smudgeball]

Red wine

Focus ??

[jayjt29]

Nice one

[smudgeball]

My settings are around the same,

maybe -7 exposure and a bit less brightness, but you need the brightness to focus the image and then drop it down.

I read that the best avi to stack will always apear a bit darker / underexposed and I've tended to set mine like that.

This was from last week just using defaults in Registax 5

Neil

[Johnboy2011]

Thanks Neil, my image was jumping around quite alot and adding a x2 Barlow was definatley too much. I think I did try to get the image too bright, I'll try and calm that down next time.

Is there a trick I am missing to get good focus or do you think I just had bad seeing or a bit of dew? Your image is the clarity I'm aiming for, maybe I need to try imaging sober!

[smudgeball]

Hi

Focus is difficult no real tips I'm afraid?

Stay away from the scope when recording. Lighter tripods/ mounts easily pick up vibration.

The avi that came from was poor / dark to look at but came out quite well.

So many factors to consider.

I think the problem with adding a 2x barlow is that if you have poor seeing you end up recording 2x poor seeing? And that just makes post processing that much harder.

I'm sure someone will jump in with better advice for you as I'm not very good at this at the moment. Still learning.

Neil

[JamesF]

I think the seeing has been pretty poor of late. Even when stars are visible there seems to be a lot of haze that plays havoc with focussing and with the stability of the image.

A few glasses of red certainly won't help, mind

James