still no joy with Orion, OK DSLR pic

[Marcus]

My Orion starshoot IV is still a disaster, with a little white circle that is supposed to be Jupiter but has no visible markings despite tinkering with every setting possible. Maybe the unit is screwed. On zooming there are basically about 9 white pixels there, it looks like a Minecraft object
On the brighter side I just held my 7D with its T piece extension in front of the eyepiece and took some OK films which I stacked, below are Jupiter and the Moon

[Shiraz (Ray)]

so the scope works as a starting point. try taking a pic of the moon with the cam and let us know what you get. If you can't get the moon, try a distant daylight scene. Make sure that it comes to focus

Jupiter should be about 50 pixels across if my mental calc is right. If you are only getting 9 pixels, is there any possibility that you could have been looking at a nearby star? The field of view of the camera is waaay smaller than that of the DSLR and it can be quite hard to find objects with such a narrow field of view.

what software controls do you have for exposure time? Total guess, but would expect to be able to see Jupiter at exposures of somewhere around 100ms.

[Marcus]

Originally Posted by Shiraz

so the scope works as a starting point. try taking a pic of the moon with the cam and let us know what you get. If you can't get the moon, try a distant daylight scene. Make sure that it comes to focus

Jupiter should be about 50 pixels across if my mental calc is right. If you are only getting 9 pixels, is there any possibility that you could have been looking at a nearby star? The field of view of the camera is waaay smaller than that of the DSLR and it can be quite hard to find objects with such a narrow field of view.

what software controls do you have for exposure time? Total guess, but would expect to be able to see Jupiter at exposures of somewhere around 100ms.

The moon is a tiny bit blurry but otherwise fine. Distant terrestrial objects, also not quite in focus. Perhaps now that I re-collimated they would be better. It was definitely Jupiter, a disc, and I think I saw moons to start with too. Software control is called "Webcam Monitor" and came with the webcam, but maybe if I use something different that will be more effective...do you have any suggestions?

I have attached a webcam picture of the moon, and a screen shot of what I was doing with the Jupiter pictures. It isn't actually just a few pixels looking at it now, it just looks really "blocky" when zoomed into.. given the resolution of the moon pic it is really strange I can't get any detail on Jupiter, after all it is almost as big more or less as the Langrenus crater on the sea of fecundity. weird

edit: I guess the poor resolution is reasonable without stacking given how massively enlarged the picture is. The problem is the complete lack of detail. I strongly suspect that the software is metering the entire sensor, even when I'm looking at a zoomed image, and so there is no scaling of an appropriate nature on the planetary disc. So I wonder whether different software might help. Surprising that only I seem to have this problem given how many people buy the camera. The telescope setup is just a plain old 8" Newtonian F/5.

[naskies (Dave)]

Looks like your Jupiter frames are being overexposed to white. Have you tried reducing the brightness by shortening the exposure times and/or reducing the gain? I'm not familiar with the software/camera you're using, so I can't help any more than that.

[Shiraz (Ray)]

Looks like the camera is OK.
yes, agree with Dave that Jupiter is overexposed - probably out of focus a bit as well. you are probably right that the software is setting the exposure based on the overall frame. From web tutorials, there is a slider in the settings section that lets you manually adjust the exposure time. If you haven't used it, try that and see if it will over-ride the auto exposure.

edit: just looked up the manual - the exposure control is under options>video filter