Quote:
Originally Posted by multiweb
Dennis is always a great help and he knows what he's doing. 
Thanks Dave.  There are two ways you can go about it. Widefield or narrow field. Widefield looks good and it's pretty easy to do. I did one here in 2014. All you need is a small refractor, a DSLR and a canon timer or other.
Long FL is a bit trickier to work with the brightness levels. I didn't get it quite right this time either. Next time should be easier. I figured that it's best to under expose Saturn rather than get it bright enough to see and burn the moon. I used sharpcap (v.3.2.6062.0). The ASI 120MM was set to full resolution (1280x960) unbinned. I've attached the camera settings for ingress and egress. I tweaked the exposure time to balance the moon and saturn brightness during the ingress but it was harder at the egress because the moon seemed a lot brighter and I nearly missed Saturn. I couldn't find it in the field although I had intitially kept the same settings when it disappeared.
You can tweak brightness while capturing in sharpcap. No need to stop and start. I did 500 frames segments because I wasn't polar aligned and had to correct the mount location often. What you see in the viewport is what you record in the SER file so it's wysiwyg. I used 16bit SER so I captured a better sample of the dynamic range. I wanted to get as much details as I could from dark to bright.
Thanks Peter. Glad you enjoyed it. |
Cheers Marc, that helps a lot. I figured I'd need to do 2 videos, one for the moon edge and a separate video for Saturn as the moon has passed over it and merge the 2 images, layering the moon over Saturn. That may be the safest way for me being my first attempt as I don't want to stuff it up just with the one video. I also don't know exactly where Saturn will pop out from the edge, I'm just going by what Stellarium shows me. I'll be at a focal length of 2500mm and using either the ASI224mc or Neximage 5.