Well this is my first Saturn shot of the year that was imaged early this morning (before the neighbours cat scared the heck out of me!
Darn they're sneaky!).
Both shots were taken with my 10" Newtonian F5 scope on an EQ6 (that was poorly polar aligned at the time of image capture). As always, I used my home made camera bracket and family video camera to capture the AVIs.
Anyway, I had just recollimated my scope and the jet stream map looked ok, plus there were no clouds around, so I decided to get some AVIs. The first image was made from 3 AVIs. One was done in just the normal camera mode to capture the colour, one was done in low light mode so I could capture the detail I wanted, and another was done in low light mode focused on the moons (though it was zoomed out more to get them all in). I processed them all in registax 4 and combined them all in photoshop. The moons are (in order from top left to bottom right) Titan, Rhea, Dione and Tethys.
Second Image:
When capturing the main avi of saturn I decided to see how large I could get the image scale (You know, just for the heck of it!). So I zoomed in, got the best focus I could and recorded away. I just threw the AVI into registax, processed it as per normal and used the coloured saturn to colourise it in photoshop. I was quite pleased with the result, and I plan on trying to make 3 AVIs on a future saturn night (one of each side of the rings and one on the planet) and use autostitch to join them all together. Has anyone else ever tested their image scale? I'd certainly like to see the results!
So now I have a question or two for the more experienced readers!
Zoom/magnification calculation:
I know that to calculate zoom on an eyepiece you do focal length divided by eyepiece. So for my scope that is 78.125X zoom with my 2X barlow. ([1250/32] X 2 ). So what happens now with camera zoom? For example if I then add on 10X optical zoom, do you multiply the scope+eyepiece by 10? Or would you just add 10 on. Or is there some other way that this would be calculated on the top?
Registax 4 Multipoint alignment:
I processed all the avis from this morning using the one point alignment in Registax. This is because whenever I used the multipoint alignment, it would give me ugly joins between sections (I would do three alignment points, one on each side of the rings and one on the main planet itself). I tried playing with some settings in the stacking process but nothing would seem to change it. Am I missing something, or is the multialignment process just for experimenting?
Well thanks in advance!