Well
Today a parcel turned up on the front door and the guy holding it said it was from Tasmania....maybe he doesn't get to deliver many parcels from there
. I was certainly happy to see it as it was my new ToUCam from David Pretorius...thanks again David
Anyway, clears skies and my eagerness to jump in the deep end combined to have me out road testing it last night (4/05).
I started out with the moon as soon as I had the scope in place and the result is below. This was done so I could learn how to actually capture an avi. The pic below is a simple load of the avi into registax and a stack and process until it looked OK. The avi shows up the waves of heat coming from my mirror so I decided to leave it for a while.
Later I came out and stuck the 8mm Radian in the scope and the view of Jove was reasonable, so I decided to give the camera a go. I quickly learned that there is a big difference between finding the moon and finding Jupiter through the camera without tracking and using my finder scope. Assuming the camera is the same as a 6mm eyepiece, this equates to 315x in my scope. David P's tutorial was ringing in my ear...align your finder and align it again. Unfortunately, my finder is only a 6x30 which makes it harder I imagine to use than a 9x50. I did eventually get it to go through the camera field and one of those avi's was stacked and is presented below. As you can see, with the native camera the image scale is a bit small. The image is just over 100 frames stacked. I haven't bothered to process the avi's of any of these shots and they may benefit from the removal of some frames.
Even though I was having 'fun' without tracking, I decided to throw in the 2x shorty plus barlow to see how hard I could make it. When I finally located and quickly focused I managed about 5 passes. These avi's averaged about 50 frames for the 10 frames / sec and 25 frames for the 5 frames / sec. The first of the two barlowed shots is at 10fps and the second is at 5fps. These are simply the avi loaded into registax, stacked, and then processed to try and bring out the detail. Again, some processing of these images to remove the blurry images might improve them a little. When stacked the images were still a bit dim. Unfortunately there was not short enough time between shots to join the avis and increase the available frames.
The moon shot was the only one to be resized (75%). The other images are at their native scale, just cropped.
I think it is a resonable start given the amount of learning I was doing - will have to spend some more time on focus and tracking, and perhaps selectively preprocessing the avi's before stacking.
Thanks for looking, and as usual...advice is always welcome.
Wow! Great job Andrew! Their bloody fantastic for a first run with a toucam! ![[1ponders]'s Avatar](../vbiis/customavatars/avatar45_9.gif){kind=avatar}
I'd better sell the lot and get a 12" Dob.
