Mars and Saturn 04-12-2007

[Chrissyo]

Two of my latest sets of images. I captured them on Tuesday morning.

I'm quite happy with my mars images, they're my best yet. This is mostly due to the fact that it's my first real attempt at Mars without using the dobsonian base. It was getting pretty light out when I was imaging Saturn, so I think I lost a bit of contrast with it. The rings really are flattening out!

These were taken with my 10" Newtonian on an EQ6 mount. I afocally attached my old Panasonic video camera to a 26mm eyepiece and 2X barlow lens.

[callingrohit]

great images chrissyo.

I'm amazed at the quality of images that one can bring using a EQ6 and then just a simple afocal can give you these amazing snaps. Basically you had about 92x magnification, did you then stack images from your avi's ? did you also crop and zoom ? The reason I ask is because when i view saturn and mars through my 8" gso dob + 25mm Ep + 2x barlow, I get 96x magnification but they don't look as huge as in your snaps. I did try and capture some saturn still images using my 400d and a eyepiece projection adaptor but i'm no where near the quality you have achieved.... wow....thanks for sharing the photos...

[Chrissyo]

Hi Callingrohit,

Actually, my magnification would be 10X that (about 960X), because I use 10X optical zoom on the video camera on top of the 26mm eyepiece and 2X barlow (Well actually, in most cases I use 15X or so which goes into digital zoom. It doesn't increase the actual detail in the images, but it gives a large image scale... which could be achieved my simply resizing the images later I guess:P).

[callingrohit]

i forgot all about the optical zoom. I use a eyepiece projection adaptor and therefore i never have any optical zoom...all i get is the magnification of barlow + EPs.

[jjjnettie]

Nice work as usual Chris.
I had the Panasonic out for Mars the other night. I still haven't processed the images. I find I'm using the video function on my Canon S3IS more now, mainly because the little camera is lighter and it give me a bigger image scale, 640x480. It has 12x zoom which is heaps big enough for what we do.
But the Pano will be coming with me this weekend up to Barambah as back up.