Solar System Stuff

[Saturnine]

Managed to do some lunar and planetary imaging in the past few days, hope someone finds them interesting. Seeing was probably 5 / 10, taken with a 150mm F8 newt, EQ6Pro, ZWO290mc.

[Merlin66]

Jeff,
Very nice!
The world has come a long way since the 60s when I started out with a 3" refractor and then a 6" f8 Wildley reflector.
The "best" images at the time (Tri-X) were detailed in S&T etc.

My bible at the time was Thomas Rackham's "Astronomical Photography at the telescope" (available now on Archive.org)


Nowadays CCD/CMOS cameras have allow us to dramatically change the landscape of astronomical imaging - much better quality.

[Sunfish]

Great planets. What are the stats on those shots?

[raymo]

Yep, nice job Jeff.

Its not the cameras or sensors that have improved images Ken; the top end DSLRs have only very recently equalled the resolution of the best film. The difference comes from the fact that we were pretty much limited to dodging, burning, and hypering, whereas today you can do pretty much whatever you want with an image, changing any and every aspect of it.
Sorry for the hijack Jeff.
raymo

[Saturnine]

Raymo, no hi-jacking involved, the forums and posts are for open discussion and information sharing. I really only started astro-imaging at the end of the film era and my results from then were a little disappointing though a few were, I thought at the time, quite good, mainly widefields though.
Sunfish ( Ray ) the rough details are, for the lunar images :-
500 fr. / 2000 stacked in Registax with about 25% sharpening, some minor contrast and brightness adjustments, that's all really.
For the planets , without checking, I think it was 1500 / 6000 stacked, with similar settings as for the lunar images. Jupiter was at , Gain 250 @ 9ms, frame rate approx 110 fr/sec.
Saturn was approx Gain 300 @ 16 m/s, frame rate 70 fr/sec.
The scope and camera used is in the original post plus a 2.5X Powermate

[Merlin66]

Ray,
The film available "back then" was the limiting factor.
Grain size/ resolution was around 20 micron/ 40 line per mm resolution. (which simplistically equates to a 25 micron "pixel")
T max was 63 lines/mm and the 2415 at best around 100 lines/mm.
The QE curve (sensitivity) was abysmal! Then you faced the reciprocity failure curve.

Even the early webcams were better!

It's an interesting exercise to compare Michael Covington's two excellent books on astronomical imaging.
"Astrophotography for the Amateur" -1985 (film based)
and

"Digital SLR Astrophotography" - 2007 (CMOS)