Shiraz
21-09-2010, 05:07 PM
Just got home after spending 5 weeks with family in Texas. The sky was very stable over there, but the only scope available was one we bought for the grandkids a couple of years ago for US$200 at COSTCO - a Meade 90mm refractor on a DS2000 tracking altaz mount with 497 goto handset and a few ordinary EPs. I had put a short 2x Barlow and my trusty old QHY5c super webcam in the luggage (doesn’t everyone..), so we had a system. And it all worked fine. The Meade mount was quick and easy to set up and it tracked well if there was no wind to cause wobbles, easily holding a planet in the centre of the Barlowed QHY5. The OTA turned out to be optically quite good as well, producing nice clean diffraction patterns on stars.
Attached are a few images, showing that if the air is stable, you can get fairly interesting solar system images from a really bottom end system. The colour balance on Jupiter is a bit odd - always has been from the QHY5 - and the Jupiter and Venus images needed super res processing to extract maximum detail (I agree that I overdid the processing), so there is some fixed pattern noise. The QHY5 has 1.3 Mpixels, so the lunar image is quite wide field - and the OTA did a good job all the way to the edges. Everything ultimately worked pretty well - I would not have been surprised to find that I was wasting my time, but it turned out that solar system imaging with this class of scope can be fun if expectations are realistic.
Attached are a few images, showing that if the air is stable, you can get fairly interesting solar system images from a really bottom end system. The colour balance on Jupiter is a bit odd - always has been from the QHY5 - and the Jupiter and Venus images needed super res processing to extract maximum detail (I agree that I overdid the processing), so there is some fixed pattern noise. The QHY5 has 1.3 Mpixels, so the lunar image is quite wide field - and the OTA did a good job all the way to the edges. Everything ultimately worked pretty well - I would not have been surprised to find that I was wasting my time, but it turned out that solar system imaging with this class of scope can be fun if expectations are realistic.