Watec 120N+ video camera

[allan gould]

Had a go at the Tarantula nebula with the Watec 120N+ video camera. Seems to be getting somewhat easier to use despite the plagues of mosquitoes here in Brisbane. Sprayed all of myself with Rid - except for 1 place. My butt looks like that of the Elephant Man after loosing at least 2 litres of blood. Anyway the shot is a stacked image of 50x10 sec shots with darks removed in Deepskystacker and levels done in PS. For such short integrations I'm pleased as to how deep I can go. Ive got to get to a dark site and see what 1 min integrations can do.
Allan

[bloodhound31]

Its good to see people pushing their gear.

Keep up the good work.:thumbsup:

Baz

[leon]

For a video shot that is not a bad effort, but I have to ask why you were imaging with no clothes on. :whistle: :lol:

Bloody mosies

leon :thumbsup:

[h0ughy]

your pushing the gear Al - thats great. My question is where did you get clear weather?

[allan gould]

Well the truth is I had to do a
(1) naked "sod off rain and cloud dance",
(2)sacrifice two virgins and
(3)give up smoking.
The first bit attracted the second but the third was covered by the new year's resolution.

[EzyStyles]

i quite like this shot there Al esp from a video camera! question, did you use some sort of noise reduction in photoshop? just that youve blend alot of finer details in the image.

[allan gould]

No its exactly as it came from the video camera. All I did was to capture 50 frames of 10 sec with virtual dub, then 50x10 sec dark. Put them through Deepskystacker and adjust levels with PS. I really want to do 1 min integrations with this camera which is rated at 0.00002lux at f1.4. The masterdark is quite noise free (see attached) but a 1 min integration is blown out of the water by the light pollution from Brisbane and a full moon at the same time as the frames were captured. Brisbane was right in the same direction of the nebula when captured - so I was limited to 10 sec shots. If I manage to get to Leyburn then I will try several minutes integration just to see how far I can push the whole thing, while autoguiding.

[EzyStyles]

there are hardly any noise from that dark frame. thanks for the info Al. I remember that goes also with my DSI. A 2 minute expo will totally blown out the image but is there some sort of histogram which you can adjust in virtual dub during capturing? i know with the DSI that lowering the histogram with its capturing software will de-bloat the image with the same expo while also capturing more photons.

[allan gould]

I don't think so Eric, but then I'm no afficienado with virtualdub. I've found it to be a good piece of software that you can set the capture rate so that the camera feedout is automatically captured as a single frame up to 60 seconds after that its manually capturing. Ill check and see about the histogram but there is another flavour of virtualdub that may have that feature