My year of planets 2005

[davidpretorius]

Starting putting together a composite of all my best images.

I have two of mars. Both have had exactly the same wavelets settings and lr & me deconvolution.

The higher one had the r,g,b all processed separately in registax. Not sure if it has made a difference and is worth all the extra effort???

[mick pinner]

very nice Dave, certainly coming along well.

[asimov]

Hi Davo! Well done. I think it would be interesting for you to do a 'bad to not so bad' too like I did, so we can see how far you've 'evolved'...but perhaps you have not got enough images for this yet?

It can't be easy doing this with no tracking mate. I congratulate you on the effort put forth by you on this!! I can't WAIT for you to get either an EQ mount or get tracking on your dob mount....then you can just setup/start capturing 5000 or so frames in one hit while your sitting there swilling down a beer or a coffee......(watever you prefer)

I'm going out on a limb 1st chance I get....to capture 6-8 mins of continuous AVI. I've been teaching myself on getting a close to perfect polar alignment by trial & error over the past couple of weeks. Cracked the technique last night! I should be able to get 5 or 6 mins continuous without mars/saturn moving off the screen.

I read your comment about you not being able to allocate how many frames per sec. Initially I had this same trouble, but then I found out one has to allocate in 2 or 3 different places in the original toucam software for the changes to take effect.

My trouble is, if I try to shoot quicker than 5FPS I will drop heaps of frames, this apparently is due to the lappy not having a very big hard disk & small RAM? (or so I've read)

[davidpretorius]

I have included jupiter as my first attempts, but have reprocessed it and it has improved 100%. Hard now to go back now as i have overwritten the old processed jupiter

[Robert_T]

Hi David - great idea to put this "best of" together, must do that myself sometime soon. I don't know how you manage to get detailed images at all without tracking, it's hard enough with!;)
cheers,

[Striker]

A credit to you David...you must be happy with your results so far.

I couldn't even comprehend imaging without tracking.

Well done

[davidpretorius]

thanks all. It is funny, I do want tracking, but for planets it is for convenience, as I remember pulling myself up and thinking how quickly i was lining up saturn through the guide scope, turning to computer, waiting for image, take 7 secs of vid, reposition guide scope and do it again. 10 passes were done in pretty short order and this gave me 300 images.

Now, for dso's I am itching to try this modded toucam, I am hanging out for tracking!!!!

[asimov]

What's even more funny is I have no particular desire to image DSOs etc....just planets!:confuse3:

I think that's because deep down I know my tracking on either of my scopes won't be good enough. Top of the line EQ mounts are financially out of my league at present!

Maybe in my next life! :lol:

[bird]

DP, the top mars image shows a bit of misalignment between the colours, when you used the RGB combine did you set the colour shifts?

Edit - I've had a go at fixing the alignment, looks like you should have another go at that top mars image, I think there's more detail possible. Here's what I got by processing your jpeg a bit more.

regards, Bird

[avandonk]

Thats amazing David I did not know you had no tracking.This can be fixed.Why I dont do high resolution images is because of the light pollution.What mount have you got.

Bert

[davidpretorius]

thanks, i have a dob mount sitting on a dob buggy of mick pinners. It has a wedge, which i am hoping to drive real soon

[davidpretorius]

thanks bird, do you suggest wavelets or deconvolution?

[bird]

Well, I usually do both... but it depends on the data.

The main issues with the top mars image in your post is that the colour planes weren't aligned in Astra Image when you did the RGB combine, and the colour weights needed to be adjusted as well to correct the colour.

regards, Bird