First Jupiter

[Chrissyo]

As the title states, this is my first registax picture of Jupiter. Two of its moons are visible as well, which I thought was a nice touch.:P

Just some info on it, the planet has kind of quirky colours. This is because of the settings on my video camera. It takes movies of Saturn very nicely, but jupiter comes out way too bright. I have to take the darkness down to see any surface detail, which makes it loose colour, and also makes it fuzzy. This works in reverse for stars and star clusters, they are too faint. I gotta work on this a little more. :P

[Comet Hunter]

Great shot Chrissyo! Looks like a hint of GRS is coming around from the left too :)

[Mick]

Yes top photo Chrissyo, looks good having the two moons in the photo as well as Jupiter. :)

[[1ponders]]

Most of us are lucky to get one moon, and you get two. Top stuff.:cool2: Its a great first image.

What sort of video camera are you using Chrissyo? Does it have manual settings for gain, exposure, frames/sec, white balance, saturation etc? And are you taking your videos afocally (holding the camea up to the eyepiece)?

[Chrissyo]

The video camera I am using is fairly old... its a Panasonic NV-DS50. We got it 3 or so years ago. I've been in the process of trying to track down the instruction manual for it so I can find if it does have most of those features. After searching through the cameras menu, nothing too good shows up. The only thing I have been able to change so far is brightness. There is a button labeled 'AUTO/MNL'. I am fairly sure this relates to general set up, as in the MNL mode (manual I believe) it has three different settings, one that one that asks what kind of lighting you have (eg, a picture of the sun, fluro lights and a normal lightbulb, as well as an AWB setting, which I think stands for Automatic White Balance or something similar (as you mentioned)). The next setting I think relates to amount of light allowed into the camera. Its different options are expressed as fractions, 1/50 being the brightest, and 1/3000 being the darkest. The last setting has 'OP+15dB'. The number can be changed, 18 making the image more bright but grainy, and 0 being the darkest. I am guessing the 'dB' stands for something along the lines of 'digital brightness'.

Apart from these, the camera doesn't have any other settings I can find that would be useful. There are some options as long play, short play, cinema mode, increased digital zoom, zoom microphone, LCD brightness etc, but nothing that would be useful. Gotta track down that darn manual.:P

EDIT: Just thought I might add a useful function of the camera. (Btw- forgot to mention, I use it afocally, using the homemade camera bracket that I recently finished). The camera can be used effectivly as a varying eyepiece. I use it with my 32mm. What you can do is point the telescope at an object, lets say Saturn. Through the 32mm, it looks pretty much just like a small dot. Put the camera in the bracket, and it shows the small dot on the screen. If you use the cameras zoom function, the dot get bigger, but naturally it becomes unfocused. Now for the cool part. By twisting the focusing knob on the eyepiece, the planet goes back into focus, even if it has been zoomed in at 10X with the camera. I'm sure a lot of you probably already knew this could be done, but I just thought it was cool being able to mimic my 15mm, and sometimes even 9mm with a 32mm eyepiece.

[[1ponders]]

Wait til you try that trick on the moon Chrissyo. You'll be amazed at the detail you'll be able to pull out. Good one.