[Fox]

Originally Posted by Tulloch

Hi Fox, that's really good image for a first attempt (much better than my first try ), well done. Saturday night in Melbourne was not a good night for imaging anything, it will get easier than that!

The 224MC sensor is really small, and changing over from an eyepiece will not help (usually), especially since the focus point is so different. If you focus with your eyepiece all you will see on the screen when you change over is an ultra-dim, ultra-large donut which is almost impossible to see. These days, once I have focused for my camera I don't change it, and instead align the scope using the out-of-focus donuts through the eyepiece. Once aligned, I point it at my last alignment star and adjust my 8x50 RACI finder to be as accurate as I can be on the star. Then when I slew to the planet, I change over to the camera, point it with the finder and then just hunt around a bit until the planet appears on the screen. It will be in focus and once centered, I re-adjust my finder to point where the camera points.

For optimal resolution, the focal ratio of your setup should be around 5x the pixel size of your camera, so about f/19 for the ASI224MC. Therefore, leave the 5x PM in the bag, the 2.5x should be ok but you might want to investigate a 3x in the long term.

You can image for 3 minutes on Jupiter, 5 min for Saturn and Mars without having to worry about planetary rotation effects. If you are new to planetary, then these tutorial videos will be quite helpful.
http://planetaryimagingtutorials.com/

Andrew

I had a look at 8x50 RACI finders on the Bintel site, I see what you mean in helping as a direct visual aid. When you 'adjust' the RACI finder, do they have spring loaded adjustment, or does the finder flop around loose in the rings when adjusting ?

Thanks for the link to the tutorials, I did in fact follow that guy's YouTube guide quite a bit for capturing, and stacking. It was with the RHS and LHS side Registax wavelet tutorials that I lost it a bit.

I realise that at the end of day, I am going to be limited by having only 127mm of aperture, but when I see Rigel003 posts of Jupiter, Mars and Saturn with a 175mm AP refractor and ASI224 camera - absolutely amazing! That really inspires me, ie. even with a 127mm refractor.

Thanks for the tips about planet rotation (I limited Jupiter to 2 mins), and about taking multiple moon images and Microsoft Image Composite Editor stitching, what a great idea !

Cheers,
Fox