[Quark (Trevor)]

Originally Posted by strongmanmike

Hey they are excellent Trevor, the detail is amazing, nice work.

Once my new fast 12" astrograph arrives and is (hopefully) plugging away and our dollar stays strong... I think my next purchases may be an affordable mount and planet camera to use with the Starfire ..I think I like the idea of only needing small windows to shoot the same object over and over and cloud weather being less of an issue...seeing will become moe of a frustrator than it already is though

Mike

Thanks very much Mike, I think you would enjoy the challenge of hi res planetary imaging. The quality of the seeing, focus and collimation become extremely critical to the result. The rate of rotation of the gas giants means that from one night to the next you are presented with a different face to image. There are lightning storms to track down on Saturn while the atmosphere of Jupiter is just so dynamic. Differential rotation that occurs on Jup and Saturn means that hi res images can actually track the movement of various storm cells and cloud features over periods of days, weeks etc. With the rotation rate of Mars being quite similar to that of Earth it takes about 31 days to get enough data to create a animation of a complete rotation, you can image clouds over the various volcanoes and also dust storms as they form and dissipate along with the seasonal changes of the ice caps at the poles.

Originally Posted by Troy

Good pictures Trevor.
I like the colours

Thanks for your comment Troy.

Originally Posted by Paul Haese

Nice work Trevor. Some very faint detail visible in the center of the GRS too. Seeing looks better than anything I have seen this year.

Thanks very much Paul, the difference in the quality of the IR live feed was the thing that most surprised me. Normally in ordinary seeing the IR usually produces a good result but due to the near max gain ( to get a nice histo at about 90%) the live feed tends to be quite grainy and it is not until the data is processed that I know if it is good or not. On this night the most striking thing was the quality of the live IR feed for my first IR capture, the detail was outstanding, it looked more like a good R channel live feed that what I would normally get for IR.