Saturn with a Toucam

[middy]

Andrew (astro_south) has very kindly given me, err, I mean lent me a Toucam for a week or two. Tonight I had a bit of a play with it on Saturn. It took me a while to get it going reliably. I seem to remember Andrew also having similar issues when I watched him try to image Jupiter once, in that the K3CCD software wouldn't recognise the webcam.

Anyway I somehow managed to get it running and collected about 900 frames of Saturn. This is just a quick stack of all 900 frames just to see what happens. Tomorrow I might be a little more selective in the frames I stack. So without further ado I present to you my best Saturn yet .... :thumbsup:

[ballaratdragons]

Woo-Hooooo!

Another Toucam moment!

Nice clear image Andrew :thumbsup:

[GrampianStars]

G'day Andrew
i like your Saturn image :thumbsup:
I've a TouCam as well and will be setting it up on the ED80
for 1st light as soon as I sort out some dovetail rails for the LX200 12"
Was thinking on getting the ADM rails
any thoughts any one? :help:

[iceman]

Great start middy! Chuck a barlow in for image scale too :) Make pushing that dob around even more frustrating ;)

[middy]

Errrr that was with a 2x barlow :ashamed: :lol:

[iceman]

ah well, the 3x barlow will increase frustration even more so ;)

[middy]

Here Mike. I used a 2x Mitchell "software" barlow on this one .... :thumbsup:

[astro_south]

Nice one Andrew

Looks like I will be droppong around my 3x TV barlow that I never really use next week ;)

900 frames - thats a bit of nudging. How does the quality vary in the 900 frames? might be worth purging out the seeing affected ones and see if that makes the image sharper.

[[1ponders]]

If that is your first go, then full credits, 1 for getting an image to stack to start with, 2 for working out how to use Registax and three punishing yourself buy trying it with a dob. :thumbsup: :lol:

There is a bit of black magic to using Registax. I don't think there are two people anywhere in the world that use it the same way. If you haven't read it already, I would suggest having a read of Mikes planetary image processing how to, if only for the Registax stacking part.

[middy]

Each AVI had about 150 frames in it, so that is only about 6 nudges. :)

I didn't have the gain up enough because you can only just make out Saturn on each frame. You certainly wouldn't be able to pick out the 'good seeing' ones without first brightening up all 900 frames. Here is a crop from one frame so you can see what I had to play with. Saturn is there, trust me!! :P

From memory I had it on 15 fps and 1/25sec exposure. I will have to read Mike's tutorial on planetary imaging before I try it again.

[ving]

nice one middy :D
try stacking another barlow on that ;)