Oval BA, Friday 22nd June

[Kal]

This was my first real outing with the Toucam after moving on from my trusty old LPI. After processing the data I noticed that I had images the Oval BA feature :)

[davidpretorius]

well done Kal, you have done very well, oval BA

[iceman]

Good start, Kal!

Feel free to share your capture settings and processing steps and maybe we can offer something in the way of improvements for next time? (seeing excluded obviousyl ;))

[Dennis]

Very nice Kal - great results for your first real outing.

Cheers

Dennis

[Kal]

For the capture it was F/25 on my 10" LX200R. Toucam settings were 10fps @ 1/25s exposure, I used K3CCD to capture with the luminence? bar on the left at around 220.

For processing I used the start of your planetary imaging guide, using virtualdub to split the avi's into bitmaps, and then using ppmcentre to crop/rank/centre the frames. From theer I went into registax but I needed to use different wavelet settings, much more harsher than in your article to get a noticable improvement. I didn't do the RGBsplit/deconvolution steps in your guide for this image, I did try it with the same data from this run but maybe because I pushed wavelets harder in registax the results seemed to be worse.

I am a bit worried about collimation of my scope. I have the latest 'R' version of the scope and there are issues where I I can't get concentric circles inside and outside of focus. It is a known issue that I have read about on cloudynights, but until now I have never really noticed it with my viewing/imaging results. I am a bit worried that I can never get great results now because I may have a scope with defective optics :shrug:

[Kal]

Here is another pic from the same run. I doubled the size in ppmcentre to process this one then reduced it to it's original size in photoshop later.

...Come to think of it, I can't honestly say I used wavelets on the pic from the original post. I mucked around trying several things and that could have been from one process I did where I used zero waveletts and alot of unsharp mask in photoshop. The colours certainly look dofferent to this pic which I definately used wavelets (+ double the image size to start with)

[iceman]

I think that's a better version, nice one Kal.