Jupiter 14 April

[mikeash]

Hello folks, this is my first post on this forum.

Here is a shot of Jupiter taken a couple of nights ago with my GSO 10 " and hand held sony dv handycam. This is first light with the scope upgraded with a new 1.83 " (46 mm) secondary from Protostar and a HCF2 low profile focuser. hence the 234 mm apature noted on the image. I was never happy with the original 63 mm secondary which caused some major astigmatism in the optics.

This mod is a temendous improvement with both contrast and detail significantly improved and I am very pleased with it.

Seeing was 6/10 but with full moon and some cloud which eventualy cleared.

Gain on the camera was a bit low!

Best wishes Mike

[Dennis]

Hi Mike

Well, well, well, what an entrance to Ice In Space! Fantastic image with heaps of detail. Welcome and well done.

Cheers

Dennis

[davidpretorius]

Hi Mike,

great stuff, have a look at the imaging comp on at the moment for guys without toucams etc under planetary images.

[iceman (Mike)]

Hi Mike.

That's a great shot, and welcome to the forum. The onion rings around the edge are usually caused by underexposure. You said gain was 0? Try gain at 30% or even higher (without overexposing) if your video camera allows it.

Excellent result for a video camera.

Is your scope tracking or is it still in it's native Dob form?

[Robert_T]

Hello Mike, always nice to welcome another planetary imager and a very nice entrance you've made here too. Well done

[matt]

Excellent stuff Mike and a very big welcome. Great to have another planetary imager aboard. Like Iceman said, it would be very beneficial for you to experiment with varying degrees of gain to wash away those onion rings. Well done!

[asimov (John)]

Hi Mike, nice entrance to the forum with that photo.

[mikeash]

Thank you all for your nice comments and welcome.

In answer to Icemans questions:

Low camera gain on this image was an error on my part I normaly use 3 or 6 dB (max is 18 dB) and so the onion ring.

my scope is still un-driven, my eq platform is still under construction and my ToUcam is still in the box. I really must get cracking on these now my scope is performing well.

Mike

[Astroman (Andrew Wall)]

WOW what an excellent image and with a handicam too. Whats the model number of that one? the resolution is awesome. Looking at getting one at the end of the year so need to pick the best ones for the amount I can spend.

[Striker (Tony)]

That looks pretty good to me...nice first shot post.

Welcome to the asylum....hehehehe

[mikeash]

Originally Posted by Astroman

WOW what an excellent image and with a handicam too. Whats the model number of that one? the resolution is awesome. Looking at getting one at the end of the year so need to pick the best ones for the amount I can spend.

Hi Andrew,

The handicam is a Sony trv17e and about 5 years old. Probably superceded by a newer model now. If you want to use a handicam specificaly for astrophotography then try and get one with the most controls particularly arround gain, white balance and exposure. Also a good optical zoom. Most Sony's come with Carl Zeiss optics(but I suspect 'consumer' grade). I think the 3 ccd cameras are better than single CCD like mine and would have better resolution. Also be aware that DV handicams use Direct Cosine Transform to compress the video which is a lossy compression like jpeg and there is some loss of fine detail. This is a constraint with my camera and I believe I could get better results if this wasn't the case.

On the plus side imaging is easy with an un-driven Dob once the technique of aiming the camera into the eyepiece and tracking the object accross the field of view is mastered.

I use the handicam because I have it. I would not however go and buy one just for astro work. I think far better to go for a driven scope and ToUcam which will ultimately give better results.

Hope this helps, Mike