first Jupiter 23/10/09 - I'm stoked!

[troypiggo]

I know this isn't much chop compared to you guys, but I'm stoked how this turned out. I have no idea what the seeing was like or how to rate it. Captured a minute or so, ran through Registax 5 with pretty much default click'n'go to see what I got, then quick Photoshop tweak.

Captured with DBK21 on C8 + 2.5x powermate. Managed to snag a moon shadow and just caught the GRS. Pure fluke.

Still not sure of the collimation. Next time I'll try to improve that a little better.

Any tips? Good Registax 5 tutorials?

[AstroJunk]

Hey Troy, that is a nice shot. You deserve to be chuffed :thumbsup:

[mswhin63]

Brilliant first effort. I look forward to getting images like that in the future.

[dpastern]

Isn't much chop? Troy, that's awesome! I'd be stoked with that as well to be honest.

As to tutorials, I did a quick google, this looks OK:

http://stargazerslounge.com/primers-tutorials/44740-primer-registax-tutorials-old-new.html

Dave

[jjjnettie]

A+ good buddy.

[troypiggo]

Thanks guys and gals.

Jonathan - your guide rings came in handy for the guide scope, so you can take partial credit for it ;)

Dave - actually turned up that same tute myself. It's for Registax 4, not v5. Suspect much of it is similar, so am going to walk through it over the weekend. Please tell me you set up tonight and got some shots yourself. :)

[Inmykombi]

Excellent result there, very nice detail between the bands.
GRS and a shadow transit, well done.

Geoffro.

[Quark]

Hi Troy,

You should be well pleased with your first effort.

Some of my thoughts that may be of assistance.

1) The orientation of images is a personal thing and there is no problem with what looks best to you, however, the IAU convention is to have South on top and West to the right.

2) If your scope is on a Equatorial mount, rotate your camera such that when you turn off your RA drive the image drifts parallel with the long axis of your capture screen. This will mean that the vast majority of drive corrections that you will need to apply will be in only one axis, RA.

3) With your colour camera you can take 3 minute captures for Jupiter, the more data the better.

4) Download Virtual Dub & ppmcentre from the resources site of IIS.
ppmcentre or ninox is the creation of Bird, one of the best planetary imagers on Earth. Convert your avi to bmp files in Virtual Dub. Look at the individual frames, deleting as many as required until the first 30 or so are good frames.

Load the Virtual Dub output file into ppmcentre to crop, centre and grade all of the images in the output folder.

5) Now when you load the bmp files into Registax V5 the best images will be at the start of the que and already centred. You will find that Registax will do a lot better job due to the prior work with Virtual Dub and ppmcentre.

6) Generally speaking, the better your data the less is the amount of processing that is required. Don't go overboard with the wavelet processing in Registax.

7) If you want to get right into planetary imaging then I would highly recommend Astra Image Pro for deconvolution processing, following your initial Registax processing. After Registax and decon with Astra Image Pro I finish off in Photo Shop CS4.

8) Get into the habit of recording everything that you do, as far as capture settings and processing regime goes. It is only by doing this that you can compare, in a meaningful way, what works and what does not work. You will, over time, create your own capture and processing regime that works for your particular scope & equipment.

Above all else have fun with it.

Regards
Trevor

[dpastern]

Well, that's the plan. Have charged Celestron powertank, and also 4 of my 5 Canon batteries. Yet to charge the laptop. Not sure if I will though - my cold is getting increasingly worse (sore throat, racking dry cough without any production). I've just woken up to a massive headache too, a real doozy. This will be the 3rd weekend in a row where I've been pretty much out of it all weekend due to illness. I'm NOT bloody happy.

Dave

[troypiggo]

Thanks again, guys. Looking at the image on a different monitor now, and I might be kidding myself, but could that be the moon just touching the top edge just near the GRS?

Trevor - just printed out your tips there so they're with me next time, as well as reference for a "remaster" of what I caught last night. Thanks so much for such a detailed post.

[Quark]

Hi Troy,
In your image the GRS is coming in from the West, the shadow is East of the GRS. The moon that is throwing the that shadow will be further to the East than the actual shadow, probably a lot further East.

In your image, when viewed full screen, there is a moon far out to the East.

I suggest you download Jupiter 2, set it up for your time location and time zone and it will show you the position of the 4 Galilean moons for the time of your capture, it even shows any shadows those moons may be casting on Jupiter.

Regards
Trevor

[dpastern]

Trevor - thanks for mentioning Jupiter 2, it looks a super program. Link here:

http://www.astrosurf.com/rondi/jupiter/

Dave

[StephenM]

Nice one Troy! I'd be pretty happy with that!

Cheers,
Stephen

[Scorpius51]

Hice one Troy! I wish I could do the same at present, but I'm having trouble loading .avi files into Registax 5.

I'm trying to load 640x480, 15 fps files originally from my Nikon Coolpix digital camera, but it's not accepting the files. What am I doing wrong folks? It's giving me an error message "Failed to start AVI decompression".

Help!!!

Thanks in anticipation.

[jjjnettie]

Hi John.
You'll need to open your .avi in Virtual Dub and then click on Save Old Format Avi.
Then open the new .avi you created in Registax.

[Scorpius51]

Thanks Jeanette, all is well now! I tried Virtual Dub and it worked nicely.

I hadn't had any problems with the avi files from my NexImage camera, it was just the ones from my Nikon that I wished to use that weren't loading.

Cheers
John :thanx: