Quote:
Originally Posted by Doodles23
We keep trying to offer the other side of Mars to complement your excellent shots such as this one. Life is hard as you know at 14 arc seconds. We are still newbies with our new Dragonfly2 camera and have an opinion about the camera that I'd like you to comment on. Specifically about life in the 12bit world. When you have a very bright planet like Mars then it is relatively easy to photograph Mars at 60 fps which will preserve nearly all the 256 levels of grey in the final image which makes stretching unnecessary. . When we switch to 30 fps at 12 bit, we don't notice a big difference in the final RGB image which is not surprising considering the monitor can only show 256 levels of grey. Such is not the case with Saturn which is dim and the dark frames do not stretch as smoothly as the 12 bit frames. Do you agree with this assessment?
And finally, we have been uploading our pictures to Japan's ALPO. But we rarely see any of the excellent photos from the Australians on that site? Is there a reason for this? I told my wife Gail that there are probably less than 50 astronomers around the world capturing images of Mars on any particular night. And ALPO only seems to get a few of them.
DB
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G'Day DB... I do contribute to ALPO but mostly in the Jupiter section. I figured that most of the mars images would come from the north this time around... but I guess the weather up there has not been good.
I'm away at the moment, but I'll be home from the end of the month so I can start imaging again just after opposition.
I always use the 16 mode of the camera, 12 bits of data as you say. Mostly because I use a fast framerate of 50fps and on most things this only gives a partial histogram and so the extra few bits of data resolution help to avoid the low-data effect that everyone calls onion-rings
On Mars I could use a higher fps for the red channel since its so bright, but with the poor seeing around here I almost always end up using 742nm IR for the red channel instead :-)
ps you should use the format-7 mode of the camera that lets you choose any fps you want, rather than just the standard 60/30/15 etc.
cheers, Bird