Mercury and Saturn 25th July (improved)

[von Tom]

Mercury and Saturn yesterday evening. Canon EOS 550D, 5x Powermate, 12" Sky-Watcher Goto Dobsonian, manually tracked.


I have included a single frame from each video, unprocessed, and the stacked frames (about 1000 each) of the videos.

Thanks for looking,

Tom

[John Hothersall]

Trace of albedo on Mercury is difficult to get especially with a phase. Saturn is still giving results.

John.

[von Tom]

Thanks John - I've redone the processing on Saturn with massive improvement and replaced the original image.

Tom

[asimov]

Great work with the DSLR as usual Tom. Any plans on moving up to a dedicated planet imaging cam in the near future?

[von Tom]

Thanks John. I have no plans in the near future, mainly due to the lack of time that's available to me to set everything up (laptop, focus etc) on such a mount as the Alt-Az Goto. Even though a dedicated cam may improve the image quality, the DSLR with its simplicity and flexibility gives me more imaging opportunities with the time I am able to spend at the telescope. I am still very interested in pushing the limits of the DSLR/Dobsonian setup and am always looking for improvements.

Cheers,

Tom

[Shiraz]

Very good images Tom. You make a persuasive argument for a quick setup system - nothing is much worse than spending a precious hour at 4am/3C setting up an equatorial system only to find that the seeing is cruddy - and then spending another 1/4 hour pulling it to bits and putting it all away again. Regards Ray

[asimov]

Yes, a good argument. I've spent the last 2 months + doing what what Ray just described, although now I have an obs which knocks the setup time down considerably.

[Matt Wastell]

Hi Tom

These are good - Venus is quite impressive - a hard target i reckon!

[Frewi808]

Very impressive captures !
Saturn still looks great there in downunder, must be still pretty high !
Freddy

[Poita]

Great shots!
I like it though when people leave up their original image and then add the one with the reprocessing after as we get to see both.
Gives us noobs an idea of wether our problems are in acquiring or processing.

Making me think that I may be better off with a big dob and my DSLR for planetary, and just keeping the ED80 for deep sky, rather than using the C8 for the planets.

[iceman]

Nice images Tom, well done!

[von Tom]

Thanks for the comments everyone. Peter, I've included some unprocessed images in the original post.
Cheers,

Tom

[Poita]

Thanks for taking the time to add the images, it really helps to know when the images you are getting are actually okay, and what to expect pre-processing.

[von Tom]

No worries Peter. I'm actually curious to know whether my own processing is OK or could be improved. If anyone would like to "pimp my Saturn" I'd love to see the results! :)