Aristarchus Plateau, Schickard, & Jupiter; poor seeing, good fun, cold night.

[Dennis]

Hello,

I was out on Friday night (15th Aug) for a brief imaging session to play with the new, beaut DMK31 recently acquired from those nice folks at BinTel. The seeing was generally quite poor so I decided to shoot at prime focus, as when I fitted a Barlow or PowerMate, the images on screen were just not worth recording.

Here are the only two lunar shots that were worth punching through Registax, where I used the auto select alignment points and R4 selected 17 & 24 MAPs. Towards the end of the session, I slewed to Jupiter and banged off a couple of AVI’s and here is the result of one of those taken with an x3 TeleVue Barlow.

Not pretty, but it was quite an enjoyable session; just being outside listening to the sweet sound of the mount purring along with the neighbourhood bathed in the eerie glow of reflected moonlight was somehow quite pleasant and relaxing, if a little cold!

I’ve included a full moon mosaic from a previous effort, showing the relative location of the two regions, as well as Copernicus and Plato from a previous imaging session with the DMK31 and Mewlon 180 F12 at prime focus.

Cheers

Dennis

[iceman (Mike)]

Wow they're great, Dennis. Jupiter is excellent! Large scale and very fine detail.

I love the large scale moon with insets!

[AlexN]

Very well done... the lunar detail is stunning!

Seeing is the only thing holding that Jupiter back, I think last night (despite the wind) was probably brisbanes nicest looking night in over 2 weeks, alas, I was lazy and didnt set up

[RB (Andrew)]

Gorgeous shots Dennis and like Mike said, love the full moon mosaic too.

That DMK31 is very tempting.

[Dennis]

Thanks Mike, Alex and Andrew,

The larger piece of real estate covered by the 1024x768 DMK31 compared to the 640x480 of the DMK21, seems to make prime focus imaging a lot more interesting as the lack of image scale is somehow offset by the overall grander setting. And, I can still shoot at 30fps.

Also, shooting at the F12 prime focus and using Multiple Alignment Points in R4 almost compensates for poor seeing, so you can still obtain acceptable results.

Cheers

Dennis

[theodog (Jeff)]

Great images Dennis.
Going close to making the moon an interesting object to look at.
Very effective layout.
Well done.

[Dennis]

Originally Posted by theodog

Going close to making the moon an interesting object to look at.

Careful Jeff! Some of the deep sky guys may stumble in here by accident and read that!

Cheers

Dennis

[Matty P (Matt)]

Awesome images Dennis, the DMK 31 definitely looks the goods. Lots of detail especially on Jupiter.

Very well done.

[Lester]

Very nice images of the Moon, well done. Jupiter is okay, but the Moon images are my pick, being so smooth.

[Alchemy (Clive)]

Quote:
Originally Posted by theodog
Going close to making the moon an interesting object to look at.

Originally Posted by Dennis

Careful Jeff! Some of the deep sky guys may stumble in here by accident and read that!

Cheers

Dennis

Traitor !




hmmmm ........ but it does look good.

[AlexN]

Someone needs to fund a NASA project to have the moon flocked... if it were a flat velvety black it wouldnt bother me so much...

[peter_4059 (Peter)]

Great images Dennis. I really like the way you have presented the full moon mosaic with the highlighted panels.

Peter

[Dennis]

Thanks guys - I appreciate your looking and your nice comments.

Cheers

Dennis

[beren]

Top work Dennis, lovely images the first one is my favourite....congrats on the new camera