I managed to just about win the battle with the clouds last night and sneak the first decent images of Mars and Saturn for a wee while. Both are showing distinctly more phase now (Sun off to the right), and Mars is a lot smaller now. There's some volcanoes, with Olympus Mons rising (the animation is two frames over 1hr 20min) and the dark spot at the centre is Ascraeus Mons, one of the row of three big Tharsis volcanoes. Vallis Marineris is at the lower right, above the bright south polar region. Not many clouds on Mars beyond the bluish north polar hood.
Saturn's not showing a huge number of features, but the shadow of the planet on the rings is growing more prominent, giving it a nice '3D' appearance.
Stacks of the best 4000 of 15,000 frames, ASI185MC, 200mm f/5 Newtonian barlowed to f/30. Stacked and processed in PIPP and Registax.
Hi Holly, thanks! It's not very sophisticated - I have a Televue 3x Barlow stacked with an 20-year-old Meade Series 4000 2x Barlow to get out to that focal ratio.
They are awesome Andy - totally magic for an 8" - envious I is
Thanks Bob! I got the means to track planets with my 16" Dob (Train-n-Track), but I have the feeling the mirror is just not as good, side-by-side my 8" outperforms the 16" for planetary imaging.
I just upgraded to the same OTA as you, Skywatcher 200P (older blue tube) and am converting my first planetary videos into AVIs right now, but there's no way they'll look that good.
I'm combining a 2x Barlow with a 5x and shooting with a crop sensor DSLR. They'll be considerably better than what I managed previously with my ED80, but I'm not expecting anything like this good.
I'm guessing the camera is the main factor...? Smaller sensor than a DSLR?
I'm only shooting about 90 seconds too because my alignment wasn't 100% perfect; there's serious vignetting going on with these Barlows and it only stays in the dead centre for a minute or so. I could track it but I'm not sure how length of video beyond 1 min affects final result. Is it worth shooting longer?
Hi Chris, and thanks for the posts and kind comments. It looks like you've made a great start in planet imaging, but if I can make suggestions based on my experiences so far...
1: Seeing is really important. Images on good vs bad seeing nights make a massive difference. Bad night - after processing you can barely make out Cassini; good night - Encke is just about there.
2: DSLR vs planetary camera... Yes, it makes a very large difference, I used to try with the dslr, far poorer results. Crop sensor DSLR is ok, but you can't do good debayering on your raw frames (I do this in PIPP, bilinear). Frame rate and exposure time is the biggest thing. With the planetary camera and firecapture, you can easily grab >10k frames at 30-40fps for Saturn and 80fps for Mars. Both get good images at shorter exposures with lower noise than from the dslr, where you'd do well to pass 1500 frames with longer exposures and higher noise. Picking the best 2-4,000 frames of a much larger sample is very handy.
3: Good optics and accurate collimation helps a lot. I have a simple laser collimator, and have been fortunate in the quality of the scope. Hopefully yours is of similar quality!
4: tracking and polar alignment is handy - if it works well, I don't even need to manually guide to get several minutes of frames (a firecapture 800x800 crop with the autotracking window cropped tight around the planet) - the planet wanders a little, but the tracker gets me a neat video of the planet that isn't too gigantic in file size.
Thanks heaps for all that! Planets are less my thing than DSOs but it's good to have something to work on whilst the Moon is bright.
I've just taken 5 mins worth of Saturn tonight (guiding manually) with a slightly different setup of the two Barlos lenses and coma corrector. No idea what I'm doing, I'm just trying different arrangements - basically trying any combo that will fit securely, reach focus and doesn't have terrible CA.
I haven't tried debayering. No idea how to go about that. Does that require a capture program like Backyard Nikon/EOS?
Also, how often is collimation required generally speaking? I last did it about two weeks ago; it's been used often since then, but no major knocks - just gentle bumps from carrying, setting up & packing down half a dozen times...
You're welcome! It sounds like you're on a similar astro journey to me, been dslr-ing DSOs for a while, decided to splash on the planetary camera for the three oppositions this autumn/winter. I might pick your brains on dslr deep sky as I've been having some focus issues (what camera do you have?).
I wonder if the 5x with the 2x may be a bit much? My 3x & 2x gives me 6x, so 6000mm already seems a fair bit. I've never used the coma corrector in the stack, so long as you're near the middle of the frame it should be ok.
Collimation I do every time I set up, doesn't take more than a few minutes, occasionally don't need to change much. But I'd regret it if I didn't do it and spoiled my set.
The debayering is something that happens I think automatically with dslr videos, but with the ones you get from Firecapture, you get the un-debayered data so you can run it through a better processing algorithm. Which, I'm assured by better people than me, gets you better results!
Ha!! Picking my brain will just blunt your fingernails - there's not much there to pick... I'm a total newbie. Got my mount and a secondhand ED80 four months ago, not yet using guiding (which is something I'll have to remedy pretty soon), imaging with DSLRs... I've barely started my journey!
For the record I use Nikons; a D600 and a D3300, teamed with a GSO coma corrector. I don't have any focus problems but it was a major headache getting the camera & CC into the focuser. Required spacers, thread converters and a LOT of filing & sanding. All works well now, or at least I think it does - yet to do anything more than a cursory 20-min test on Trifid (D3300) and Lagoon (D600).
Teaming the 2x with the (very cheap GSO) 5x is probably asking a bit much, yeah... but the tendency is to push it as hard as it can go! I assumed that the CC wouldn't matter in the center but seems to not be the case. With it, everything looks fine. Without it, total shambles. Now that I think about it, that probably means that either the collimation is out or that the silly train of Barlows, collars, spacers and 2"-1.25" adapters etc is so long & so heavy that it's not actually straight. It's a ridiculous looking setup, I can tell you - the DSLR is about 20cm away from the OTA. It's actually surprising it works as well as it does.
Sounds like a lot of work to get it going Chris! I hope it works well for you now. I've no experience with Nikons (always had Canons) so I'm not sure I can comment much on the set-up. But happy snapping!
