Hi All,
Firstly, not much sleep after marathon last night with exceptional seeing. Saw a LOT of new things including M22 M6, M7, Lagoon Nebula and the M24 star cloud.
I would have to say that Sagittarius is now my favourite for pretty nebs and clusters.
I tried to push the limits on the 5 inch reflector and digital Pentax Afocal setup as the seeing was very clear and turbulence free from my house and I was running out of night to pick up all the things I hadn't seen before.
The new ED 12.5mm Eyepiece is a blast!
It just goes to show what quality (relatively better) optics can show you. I saw many more stars in Omega Centauri rather than just a blob and M4 and NGC 6231 in Scorpius were very pretty in the Eyepiece even at only at 80X magnification.
All in all I was very impressed with the performance of the optics of the new EP compared to the original Plossls I have.
Images of Saturn and Jupiter at 200X with the 12.5mm ED and the 2.5X Barlow seemed to be much bigger, clearer and cleaner than the old 250X with the 10mm, with Jupiter's Galilean moons clearly strung out on each side (3 on one and 1 on the other?). I managed to take a photo of these but Jupiter is WAY too bright in them and washes out the frame.
The AVI files I took dont do the view justice, I have just finished two pics after using Mike's excellent guide to Virtual Dub, PPM Centre and Registax. I took about 10 minutes of AVI's all up with the best two files run through the wringer to see if I could clean them up.
I didnt split the RGB, but did align the RGB channels in Registax as they were a bit screwy and adjusted the brightness and contrast up a bit due to the low light of the high mag on my scope.
I feel they are better than my originals posted before, see what you think, be kind as I think I have reached my mental and physical limit for processing this data to the nth degree. Its obvious that if you put crap in, you get slightly polished crap out!
After 2 hours sleep and 5 of processing over and over, I had to throw out my Saturn avi reprocesses as they were WAY too dark and grainy (at zenith too) but seeing as how I took more of Jupiter because its rarer than Saturn, I am no complain! FYI, Jupiter was about 40 degrees up for most of these shots. The time of the avi's were 3:24 am and 3:28am with the camera set to 2.75x optical zoom and approx 400 stacked frames each)
The Camera's AVI setting maxes out at 640X480 pixels so this may be what is letting the side down in terms of details?
All in all I think the scope and camera combination is not bad for what it is, but I think moon shots are more suited to its capabilities. I think I will leave the hi-res planet shots to the big guns.
Cheers for now
Chris
[first two images are my previous bests, then there is one each from each avi file from Registax, then a still I took, then file 2 again and file 1 again with the last two showing the most details (in my opinion, not sure what the spot is on the second to last one?) ]
