Alright, I've had my telescope for 2 weeks now and my new SPC900NC arrived yesterday (thanks AlexN for the advice!) - so I had my first serious attempt at astrophotography last night, so you'll have to excuse the crap quality .. I'm just learning
Setup:
- 8" f/6 Dobsonian (so untracked)
- SPC900NC (unmodified)
- Cheap 2x Bintel Barlow
- Shutter: 1/33 exposure (I think?)
- Framerate: 5fps
- Everything else: as recommended by the tutorials here
- Processed in Registax and GIMP (sharpened and slightly enlarged)
Took a few movies of Jupiter but got the best and stacked/waveletted it (see below). I'm pretty happy to have captured the GRS on the first attempt as I've never been able to see it by eye.
Any suggestions? The colours aren't perfect (I didn't bother playing with the colour settings on my first run), and I had quite a lot of stiction trying to adjust the azimuth ... need to modify the Dob base - registax had a lot of difficulty tracking the zigzag pattern of Jupiter.
Two questions for those with more experience:
- Does it make sense to rotate the camera so that the object of interest travels horizontally across the camera image as opposed to diagonally? I could probably squeeze more frames out of the object that way
- Is 5 or 10fps better in general? In daylight they both look completely identical (15fps is the first noticeable jump) .. but would double the number of medium-quality frames be better than a regular number of high quality ones when it comes to stacking?
Cheers.