Saturn attempt, Jan 3

[rick01]

Hello all.

This is my first Saturn attemp this year. It can not be compared with yours excellent shots, but it is MY Saturn :).

Taken with 8"/f5 Skywatcher Newton, 6mm vixen plossl and panasonic fz-18 camera with 12x zoom. 2200 frames of 640x480px video stacked and sharpened in Registax and final sharpening in AstraImage.

[rick01]

Aaand, one question.

I bought qhy5 ccd for planetary imaging, but the saturn image was worse than picture taken with panasonic (delay between pictures was few minutes).

Simply, the qhy5 is much sensitive on worse seeing than panasonic...
And, with red filter it wasn't much better.

Can anybody help me resolve this problem ? What exposures, filters are you using in planetary imaging?

[bird]

G'day Roman,

Most people here will be using a high-sensitivity ccd camera like the DMK21AF04.AS or Philips ToUCam, etc.

I'm using a Dragonfly2 mono camera from Point Grey Research, it uses the ICX242AL ccd that's also used in the Skynyx cameras.

From a bit of googling it looks like your camera uses a cmos sensor, this will make your like a little harder since most cmos cameras are lower sensitivity than ccd.

For filters, I can recommend the I-Series from Astrodon, they are noticeably better than the Astronomik RGB filters I was using early last year.

On Saturn my setup is this:

Scope: 13.1" f/5.5 newtonian
Barlow: TV 5x powermate + extension tubes for effective 7x
camera: PGR Dragonfly2 mono
Filters: Astrodon I-Series

Capture settings: gain at max, 20fps in each filter.

regards, Bird

[Screwdriverone]

Very nice Roman,

I tried some Saturn shots with my 5" and a Toucam and got nowhere near this quality, well done!

Cheers

Chris

[rick01]

Thanks for replies.

Thanks bird for explain. It looks that I will have a look at some DMK's :).

One more question: what makes the image more resistant to seeing (what have a higher influence to sharp image)? Shorter exposure or faster framerate?
Regards

Roman

[bird]

Roman, the shorter exposure gives sharper frames, but you also need the higher framerate to get enough frames.

You should look for a camera that lets you set the framerate to 1/exposure so that no light is wasted. eg if you wanted an exposure of 35ms then that means 28fps is possible, so the camera should let you do this.

regards, Bird

[iceman]

Nice start Rick, good image!