Jupiter - July 7th

[netwolf]

Hi All,

I am still processing through what I captured last night, first light for the PGR Dragon Fly Express. Thanks again to the kind and generous help of Bird, I was setup and ready. Unfortunately I have discovered that my diagonal was the source of ths dust, so I was wasting a lot of time geting Jupiter to sit in an area which was dust free. The Barlow's magnify this dust. I was thinking of a new diagonal anyways so thats now on the list of things.

I mostly ran with the TAL 3x barlow because the 5x powermate magnified the dust to much.

I used 30fps at 50seconds giving me about 1500 frames and I used half of those to get this first image which was actually my final run for the night before i called it quits. Possibly the best because it was around 9:32pm, and Jupiter was getting quiet high.


I ran it through Registax, wavelets (mild and final as per Mike's guide), then LR deconvolve 7 iterations at 1.4 radius. Level and auto stretch. Thats it.
Edit: I think i did a bit more wavelets than I thought i had.
2nd one is same as above, but LR 8 with 1.2 experimenting.

Regards

[iceman]

great first light Fahim! The seeing was rubbish here last night.

Well worth a first effort, great stuff.

[h0ughy]

very nice Fahim, be great to see the finished result

[Dennis]

Those are superb 1st light images - well done!

Cheers

Dennis

[IanL]

Superb images like the detail.

Ian

[netwolf]

Thanks guys, I am limited to B/w at the moment but already I can see why Bird got this camera. The rest of the AVI's I got have Jupiter moving off screen so I am going to have to edit them a bit. Also I have to work on increasing the frame rate, I think I can handle 60fps with my current setup of Firewire 400.

I need to sort out a filter wheel but I am going to save and buy a motorized one if i can resit the temptation to jump to quick and get a manual one.

Regards
Fahim

[RB]

Excellent work Fahim !
Looking forward to more.

What diagonal were you using, can't you just give it a good clean?

[davidpretorius]

great stuff

are you using windows with the dragonfly and also have you thought of writing to ram for 60 fps?

[netwolf]

David, I think it is writing to RAM because it does the Save to disk at the very end. I am using Flycap its a bit limited but does the job. I am using the Standard IIDC drivers for it so it does not appear as a WDM/VFW device hence other applications can not see it. PGR do have a Alpha release of a Directshow driver but its seems unstable. I also tired a generic IIDC Directshow bridge driver from a Robotics research group, this also only worked with there own application.

I need a capture software that can natively see and control IIDC 1394 cameras. I believe IC Capture and Lucam Recorder and Fire-I software can do this. Then there is Linux, which I am currently looking at loading on my other laptop. I would prefer to stick with Windows if I can. But I am willing to explore Linux (gives me a practical reason to learn it finally).

Andrew, yes non-dark skies like yours drive us to do the only thing we can Imaging. Oh yes I did try to clean it, with the UHTC snake oil I have. But its hard to get at to clean. I will give it another go in daylight.

Regards

[netwolf]

Ok all done now, to the best of my ability. All pretty much the same process as the previous ones. Just taken earlier. The first is the 2nd one posted before taken back into registax and some Wavelets applied. The other two have had the same process + wavlets at the end.

[bird]

Fahim, nice work! I didn't expect you to be up and running so quickly...

For fun today I installed the DirectShow drivers from PGR and managed to get my Dragonfly2 running under K3CCD, maybe that's a better option for capturing than using flycap or amcap? The camera shows up as a WDM device.

It was a bit fiddly to get it all working, but in the end it seemed ok. I think part of my problem is that I'm using an old install of Win2k and it's a bit cantankerous.

cheers, Bird

[netwolf]

Bird I was a bit fast to dismiss it, I was in a rush to get it up and working to test it. I am glad i got it out of the way , as today its raining so I would have been put off if I had not gotten it out of my system.

I am guessing your still using Windows for post processing, once captured using Linux. Is there now a Registax or equivalent for Linux?
I did come accross a Astro Linux distro some time back, but it seemed very specialized towards Scientific/Observatory setups.

Regards
Fahim

[bird]

No, Registax is Windows-only :-( I also use Astra Image, and it's Windows only as well. Those are the two things that make me reboot to Windows for processing...

Bird

[netwolf]

Ok for some reason Astrosnap is treating it as a frame only device not I cant switch to streaming mode. But I can set format 7 and other features. Might have to palm off Astrosnap and buy K3CCD.
Regards

[rumples riot]

You'll find though Fahim that 60fps is not going to be a reality once you start using filters even at the image scale you have presently. Diameter is your next problem to deal with.

Nice work in monochrome though. Welcome to RGB imaging. You Anthony helping you though and he is a great help.

[netwolf]

I was reviewing my captures, and I found one I did by mistake. This is was a 100frames capture i did in error, as I forgot to set 50sec.

I have uploaded two version, they are both the same. One is marked. What is this feature. Its not there in my other captures.

Regards
Fahim