Saturn with PGR Flea3, April 20

[bird]

Well, here's my first image with the new PGR Flea3 camera, what a beast - much higher red sensitivity than the old camera, and higher in green as well. Blue seems about on par.

Anyhow, here's an image, real size as captured. Lots to see, including the SED storm which can be clearly seen in multiple bright cores.

ps note also that the edge artifact is gone :-)

cheers, Bird

[trick]

Nice one Bird

Thinking of buying one myself, I have an old Dell laptop running vista that I can wipe and install Linux. Its been about 6 years since i last played with Linux what version are you using?

I asked this in another thread but Price of Flea shipped to Aus?

Thanks, love your work.

[bird]

Hi Trick - running under Linux is tricky (sorry about that). Modern linux distros have switched to a new firewire driver setup that my capture software is not compatible with, so I'm running a mix of a new distro + old, custom compiled kernel.

If you're into that sort of thing, then linux kernel 2.6.28 with the "old" firewire stack enabled will do nicely.

On the other hand, if you want to use Windows instead then there are a couple of people (not me) working on capture software for that as well.

cheers, Bird

[DavidU]

Very nice Anthony. I wonder how Mars would come up with that extra red sensitivity?

[trick]

Thanks

[bird]

very very nicely I expect, especially ir742 :-)

[h0ughy]

it looks very impressive Anthony, wonder what Jupiter will look like?

[bird]

yup, I feel another 5am start coming on tomorrow morning...

Bird

[Paul Haese]

Looking very good so far. Nice capture of the storm too. Even some slight detail showing in some of the bands. What sort of download rates are you getting Anthony?

[iceman]

Looking very promising indeed! Looks very sharp.

Is there a USB version or is it only firewire? and does it work on Windows? :)

[bird]

Answering some questions... Paul my capture app is limited to 50fps in 16 bit, but the camera can do up to about double that, it's 1394b (firewire-800) so it should be good for almost 80Mb/s. I've set this limit so it doesn't use too much cpu time and starve the other programs I have running, but now that I'm capturing to a usb3 external drive maybe I can remove that cap.

Mike, there are usb and GiG-E versions coming later this year, also Torsten Edelmann is adding support to his Firecapture software for Windows.

cheers, Bird

[iceman]

Nice - I wasn't aware of that tool. Looks good. I'll give it a try and see if it handles my DMK41 better on this Macbook.

[Lester]

Wow, that Saturn is outstanding. All the best with your Flea, Anthony. I bet there will be others with Fleas soon.

[Paul Haese]

That looks interesting. Might have to investigate further. Although I was getting around 58 fps for Mars this year with the skynyx in the red channel.

[bird]

paul, mars is so bright in the red, and this camera so sensitive in the red, you could probably double that speed.

cheers, Bird

[Quark]

Excellent result Bird,

Depth of detail is most impressive both in the banding and the storm.

Bird, is this 16 bit and if so what do you gain from that, probably a silly question, but I am an ex mine worker not a computer wiz-kid.

Regards
Trevor

PS: Like the colour balance, looks great to me.

[bird]

Trevor, the camera is really only 12 bit, so the bottom 4 bits in the 16 bit data are all zero. But the advantage is that you get more shades of grey - 12 bit is enough for 4096 shades between black and white, versus 256 shades for 8 bit cameras.

cheers, Bird

[Doodles23]

Does this mean that this will be your planetary camera for Saturn from this moment on?

[bird]

Dave, most likely yes. My old camera was also 12 bit, but the new one seems to be a bit better in many ways.

cheers, Bird

[Quark]

Thanks for the explanation Bird, I guess that contributes to the increased depth of detail.

Regards
Trevor