Moon image 22-12-09

[mswhin63 (Malcolm)]

Hi All,

Captured another mosaic of the moon last night. The wind was terrible and scope was flailing all over the place. Maybe need to look for a temporary dome or something. Was good seeing conditions but need a motorised focus control to help acheive focus better. This is especially harder when the scope is not tracking.

Webcam image using the VAGENT on 800 x 600 resolution. AVI file totalled 17GB so this will be the last possibly until I can get a bigger hard drive. I only have 3 to 4GB hard drive space left. Will consider a external hard drive.

Originally I was having massive problems fitting correct filters to bring down the exposure level and ended up using double polarising filter and spent ages just getting the right turns for the best laight levels.
This time I tried something new, I put the dust cover cap on the OTA and opened up the 2" hole and got the best light level into the scope. I was then able to adjust driver exposure level to get the right light.

The only problem with doing it this way was the filters used to reduce the imperfection on my primary mirror. Damn i need to clean it. Load of black dust spots were picked on the AVI, fortunately Registax managed to smooth some of them out and IMerge clean them out more.

The only other gripe I have is that I may have damaged the CCD sensor on the camera when I modified it , and have horrible colouring across two corners so can't process this in colour.

The second image is an experiment in trying to get a close up, failed miserably, couldn't focus and as I was using a 3 x barlow the image was racing across the screen.

Thanks for looking.

[Inmykombi (Geoff)]

The first image is a "cracka".
clear and sharp.

well done

[jjjnettie (Jeanette)]

Webcams are great aren't they?

It's done a lovely job on the moon.
Have you had a go at Jupiter yet?

[Quark (Trevor)]

Hi Malcolm,

Like the first image, a nice job there.

Any spots or dust mots that you are seeing on your live feed are not from dust on your primary mirror, they will be from minute spots of dust on your CCD. Not sure about the configuration of your CCD, some have clear glass over the top to protect the CCD itself and dust mots are relatively easy to clean off of them. It would pay to track down some one else using the same CCD as you to find out how they clean it.

Regards
Trevor

[mswhin63 (Malcolm)]

Thanks all, I must admit I am a bit impartial on the first image I did too. I am sure if the wind wasn't so strong it would have been better.

Usually I registax all 13000 frames but my hard drive is almost full and so I could only extract 1300 images and from each mosaic 10 images were Registax'ed to get rid of impurities and noise. I usually use registax on about 50 to 100 images with plenty of images to reject if really bad. Unfortunately 10 image per mosaic wasn't much at all.

I have done some Jupiter images but not with a Barlow, and as it only a non tracking DOB the resolution is not the best but still quite proud of the result. Once I investigate and afford tracking I will do some more higher res images of the planets. Below is a link to my album where I have taken a few images.

http://picasaweb.google.com/mswhin63

I found the dust on the IR filter I used. I will clean it see if that fixes the problem. I have seen the marks where I screwed the Mogg adaptor in too hard and feel it crushed the CCD sensor slightly causing the funny colours on the image. The Mogg adaptor screw is to long for the camera yet the others are too short to work with my camera.

Attached is a raw Frame image before Registax, notice the blue tinge on the upper left corner and the brown tinge on the lower left corner of the image. Can also see the dust.

Overall despite the problems the image quality from the camera is great. I still have so much more resolution left on the camera but the frame rate is quite slow and starts to show blur of planetary motion as well. If i had tracking i am sure i can go much higher resolution.

Next venture bigger hard drive.