Hi all,
Matt's awesome images of Mars from Brisbane inspired me to get a SPC900NC for Christmas. My Mogg adapter arrived on Friday and this is my genuine first attempt at Saturn from last night.
Conditions were poor. Mars was absolutely swimming but Saturn was bigger so I captured about 1000 frames of AVI just before the thick cloud set in at about 1am.
The first attachment is one of the best raw frames. The second is a stack of the best 250 frames in K3CCDTools.
I can see the Cassini division (just) in some of the frames as well as a cloud band on the planet. I'm very excited to have captured anything at all
I spent about an hour and a half playing with the focus and this is as good as I was able to get it. My Celestron "Wedgepod" mounting is highly unstable and every nudge of the focus knob makes the whole image wobble for about 10 seconds
So I need to know what to do next. Maybe:
1. Wait for better seeing before deciding;
2. Build a Hartmann mask;
2. Order a "Bintel Crayford Focuser SCT 10:1 (2")" for $149 (does anyone have experience with these or know if they are good);
3. Install an IR cutoff filter.
I need to get an idea of what is going to be most effective. Any advice on cam settings/processing would also be much appreciated.
Obviously a better mount would help heaps but that is beyond the budget at the moment and I was surprised at how easy it was to track objects using my existing setup. It's only a problem when I need to touch the tube to focus.
Thanks for your help.
Have fun,
Doug