Outer planets

Hi All,
Has anyone tried getting webcam images of the outer planets yet.
Uranus and Neptune are swinging into view.
Heres a pic of Uranus I got last week,

homepage.eircom.net/%7Esac/graphics/outer/ur3.jpg

Obviously its a damp squib of an image, but you can see the real colour of the planet, remember its only 3.7 areseconds in size at mag 5.7
I think the camera is near its limits here as it was not possible to get a black background, although I might have figured out a way given more time.
Focusing was fun also.....

Hi Dave


Am going to try soon(if I ever get the time, I'm on the team beta testing registax 3, that's all the astronomy I'm doing at the mo and it's enough!). All I can think of is 2 things

- Collimate, collimate, collimate (ok that's 3)

- try RAW mode. I use it exclusively now and it's great for getting really hi res because the noise level is so much lower which means you can wavelet the hell out of it with out getting too much noise.

CS
DaveG

Hi Dave,
I also have collimation on the brain, I noticed that I'm arranging everything in straight lines directly behind each other like the sugar bowel and tea pot, although how this affects my imaging is yet to be determined ... :lol:

Quick Q, will registax3 be able to process raw images, does registax2 ???
I was able to get my hands on a second toucam, one will be left as is and the other will be modified for raw images, I might convert the first camera to a SAC camera, Im not sure yet if I'll bother..

As for the Uranus shot, I forgot to mention that it was located about 4 degrees above the roof of my house at the time, so imaging was crap, but worth it for the first go just to see what was possible.

Dave

Don't think it will but there's loads more new features that are looking great! that's all I can say at the mo.

You don't have to do serious work with your webcam for RAW. Locate the prgograms WCRMAC and AVIRAW. WCRMAC converts your webcam to raw - this is software only and it gives the option to save your original settings so if you f£$%& up you can revert. AVIRAW converts raw to avi and it's as simple as that! When I'm imaging in RAW because it's in BW I make the image bright enough so that it's just blow saturation. Hope this helps.


DaveG

Beautiful night last night! Below first attempt at Uranus - what a pain. It's so small and the seeing so bad it was hard to make out a sphere. AVI of 1000 frames of which 500 were used



daveG

Thats a fab image their Dave, something to aim for.
Suddenly my image of Uranus looks much worse, hardly worth posting.

I can just imagine voyager2 flying past in the image you captured.