First Philips 900nc photos - can it be better?

[Cluster]

Hi,

I've finally got my Philips 900nc webcam working. The first one sent to me from a seller in Canada did not work. It would be detected by the system but the drivers could not be installed (even if attempted manually). Finally, the seller was good enough to send another.

On the weekend I tried imaging Jupiter using K3CCD. I have a 6 inch GSO reflector and used a 5x GSO apo barlow. The image without a barlow, or my 3x barlow was just too small.

The results:

Stacked image:
http://users.on.net/~mmienik/photos/astronomy/planets/Jupiter%20-%2045deg,%205x%20GSO%20apo%20-%205.jpg (http://users.on.net/%7Emmienik/photos/astronomy/planets/Jupiter%20-%2045deg,%205x%20GSO%20apo%20-%205.jpg)

Movie used to create it. Not much detail visible and a fair amount of boiling and fringing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BKlDNEhc7o

Apart from the seeing conditions being less than ideal, how much more detail can I expect to see?

How is magnification calculated for my 150mm F5 reflector with 5x barlow?

It was not possible to focus the image more sharply. Jupiter was about 45 degrees in the sky but I didn't want to wait to 5am.

The GSO 5x apo barlow is fine but there's still a lot of false colour in the image. Would buying a Televue barlow, or a powermate improve the image substantially? I don't want to waste a lot of money needlessly, seeing as this is only a 6 inch scope.

Thanks,

[war bird]

not a bad start, i have also just started imaging with the 900
and initial results are positive.
if you go to [solar stm images] there is my first pic of saturn taken with it through a 6 ''.

[iceman]

How did you take the image? Can you describe your capture and processing?

The colour channels are WAY out of alignment - it will improve dramatically just be realigning the colour channels.

You should wait for the object to get higher, and you'll get less atmospheric dispertion. I'm not sure how good the GSO 5x barlows are - with a colour camera, it may not bring the channels back together very well which will make aligning and registering the frames difficult unless you pre-split the avi into the RGB colour channels.

[Cluster]

I got the unmodified webcam and adapter, downloaded K3CCD, collimated and rushed outside to take my first videos. I tried without a barlow first but that yielded very small images of jupiter. 3x barlow was ok, 5x is good but I feel it may be magnifying too much. It's only a 150mm reflector.



The video faithfully represents what I could see at high magnification through an eyepiece: thick bands across the planet and not much else. Focus could be better but after trying for half an hour I couldn't improve it. Waiting until next month when Jupiter is closer and higher in the sky at a reasonable time will help.

I haven't tried playing with colour channels, splitting them, etc. I merely used K3CCD's planet wizard. K3CCD has a lot of options I haven't played with yet.

I have had problems with collimation in the past. The telescope arrived way out of collimation and the secondary had to be moved outward as far as possible. I've used a long tube Cheshire with crosshairs and a laser collimator. As I don't have access to another 6" telescope it's difficult to tell whether what I'm seeing is poor because of the telescope or just conditions.

[iceman]

For a 6" scope, 5x might be too much unless the conditions are very good.

Use a 3x next time, and wait for the planet to get a bit higher in the sky (any time after 1 or 2am), and post your results.

[Robert_T]

Hi there, if I were to offer one piece of advice it would be to focus on focus... before laying out for a powermate you'd be better off investing in an electric focusser. It's virtually impossible to get the focus accuracy you need on a screen when manually focussing.

After focus comes collimation...

cheers,

Rob