Couple of shots taken Sunday 19/12/04

Saturn.
www.gremlinsden.com/images/sat1.gif

Lunar Apennine Mountains.
www.gremlinsden.com/images/moon1.jpg

Still a lot to learn but I'm particularly pleased with the saturn shot.

Prime focus 12.5 reflector @ f/5.8
Logitech QC pro and registax.

Clear skies,

Dave.

Those are indeed lovely images Dave.
Mind me asking how you took them?

Those are indeed lovely images Dave.
Mind me asking how you took them?

Of course I dont mind:)

Basic equipment was 12.5inch reflector on synta EQ6 mount.
Logitech Quick Cam pro with the standard lens removed and help at the prime focus of the scope by elastic bands:) I do have a webcam adaptor but with the 12.5inch scope the focus needs another half turn past the fully racked in position. Removing the webcam adaptor gives all the focus travel needed. Focussing itself is a bit of a chore. Because, the video image is about half a second behind what it should be it takes a lot of fiddling about to get it right. What I did was pointed the scope at polaris and focussed until I made the image of polaris take up as few pixels as possible on screen. The problem is that on screen resolutions make it very tricky to see the finest focussing errors. Once I had the best focus I could get I moved the scope very carefully to the desired object.

For the saturn image I used the standard logitech video capture software. Exposure time was 1/50 sec and gain was reduced slightly to eliminate as much noise as possible. I took two minutes video. Saturn was a bit low down in the murk at the time. I hope to get a better shot with Saturn a bit higher up.

Processing on registax was done using the setup defaults. After registax had finished with the aligning, optimisation and stacking the result looked very soft, (the cassini division could not be seen at all). The next step is wavelet processing in registax. There are 6 layers in the image and an adjustment sliders for each. It seems layer 1 has the biggest effect. The tricjk seems to be adjusting the sharpness until you get the best balance between sharpness and artificialness. You can also adjust the colour balance/gamma/hue/saturation/. I'm sure folks like Dave Gradwell have firm ideas on all of these but for me its a case of 'suck it and see'

I brought the resulting image into paint shop pro and applied a 'despeckle' filter.

The image of the lunar highlands was done in exactly the same manner except I used 1/100 sec exposure.

Clear Skies,

Dave.

Interesting stuff Dave. Looks like your getting a bit of use out of Registax and your webcam.
So far, what I do with my Toucam Pro is I take exposures at a rate of 5fps (1/5 sec exposure). I turn down the brightness until the image appears quiet dim on the screen as stacking does have a cumulative effect which can result in washing out of detail. This is especially true of the moon where there is a huge range of contrast between dim valley floors and v. bright mountain peaks. I find it tricky with the webcam to get the contrast to work right. So far I have found that my best moon images have actually been with a basic digital camera pointed into the telescope eyepiece. www.geocities.com/michaeloconnell78/
As for Saturn, that's not a bad image at all. It's still low down until the early hours of the morning and so is difficult to image. Also, a good image requires steady skies, something we haven't had in a long time due to the very changeable weather we've had of late.

Good to see there's someone else here into astrophotography!

Clear skies,

nice one Dave,
you cought the casinni division in the rings.