Thought I would start my own thread since I am after some processing advice as well.
Anyway the story first. At 4pm or so, things went downhill fast. 100% cloud cover at about 5pm-7pm. I literally stood outside for that entire time wishing the cloud would go away. I had the telescope cooling and outside ready for set up. I had a friend waiting in UK for a livestream that was probably never going to happen.
At about 7pm, I thought WTH and set the scope up. Only took about 10 minutes with everything outside already, and when I was sure it wasnt going to randomly rain. Everyone in the house thought I was retarded lol. All the neighbours were inside. A possum decided to visit too, which was nice, wandered up to within 5 metres, had a bit of a sniff and went on with his/her night.
A crack in the clouds opened about 7.40pm. That allowed me to purely align the telescope and center the moon in the viewfinder. Very faint due to hazy cloud still in the crack. About 20 seconds, then it was gone again. But no matter, I had tracking now.
I had the telescope focussed on the moon from three nights prior, and locked the mirror. There was absolutely no way I would have been able to focus last night, so that was extremely lucky that I left it locked, anticipating such a scenario.
About 20 mossie bites later, and at 8.20pm (+/- 1 or 2 minutes due to camera time uncertainty) a 90 second clear crack appeared in the cloud. Just incredibly perfect timing:
http://i1186.photobucket.com/albums/...ps1f92ae36.jpg
I got the ozone band too! (Blue/grey colour band clearly visible). I know it isnt anywhere near as good as it can be with further processing. But I was too excited not to post it lol. Ill come to processing later.
Somewhere around 9pm, I got another crack, about 60 seconds. A bit further refinement on camera settings, re-center due to polar mis-alignment. Managed to rattle off 4 pictures. Another crack around 9.30pm, again about 60 seconds, and another 4 or so pictures.
About 9.40pm, there was a nice hole, and took some pictures and managed to squeeze out a 5 minute HD livestream to my friend in England. She was absolutely stoked, even though I was at 6400ISO and 1" shutter, and the noise was fairly bad (still very useable). I had pretty much told her not to expect anything good out of the evening.
Then the clouds cleared nearly fully right around 10.15pm, squeezed off a few partial phase pictures, then packed the scope up.
Perseverance pays
.
Details for posted picture:
Celestron EdgeHD 925, Losmandy G11 G2
Canon 5D MKIII @ f/10, all Televue adapters, Blue Fireball 35mm ext
ISO 1250, 0.8s, daylight WB, 8 sec timer, mirror lockup (live view).
Very slight levels and contrast adjustment, and JPEG conversion from RAW, on colour/brightness calibrated monitors.
I know the ISO and shutter speed are too high and long respectively, but I really had no choice in the matter. About the best I can do given the turbulence, drift, cloud and aperture. The grain in particular is very bad, and i feel that is where my signal-noise loss is occurring.
I did manage to get 3 or 4 images which can be stacked, pre-totality, totality and post-totality. I feel this, in combination with some LR Deconvolution may be my saviour.
I am keen to take onboard any advice anyone has on how my image can be improved, including software recommendations. There are a few tutorials online, but there are so many different workflows so thought I would ask here to see what advice anyone who may have done something similar can give me.
TIA
