Folks, it's been a couple of years since I last dabbled in this and many components of my setup have since changed so I see your collective wisdom
Last night I setup my C11 (on an EQ6) in our suburban Sydney garden and for the first time with this scope I dug out my Celestron Neximage (the old vga resolution one). I focused on Procyon using a Bahtinov mask and didn't touch the focuser after that. I took a handful of avi clips with Sharpcap during a half hour period (11:30 - midnight), just as Io's transit was finishing.
Today I've been re-learning how to do some basic processing... pipp for cropping followed by AS!2 for stacking, with normalising to 75% and sharpening enabled. I've been playing around with the number of frames and percent values to see the effect on the resulting image.
I noticed that most of my footage is pretty dark, and that didn't process too well...I ended up with a lot of grain and red-brown being a feature, like in the third image. Luckily I had played with the exposure settings a bit from clip to clip, so had a couple of clips to choose from.
I ran into a problem last night where I could get the object on the chip fairly easily at f/10 - as the planet was pretty low, I was using only the visual back and 2" to 1.25" adapter with no diagonal - first centring with an eyepiece, and then substituting for the Neximage and it was always in the view in Sharpcap. When I then tried to add the 2.5x Powermate into the chain, I couldn't get the image on the chip no matter how I tried
with the eyepiece, I could centre and see an image just fine, but when swapping it back for the camera...nope
any tips for achieving this? I'm using a Baader Clicklock visual back and a TV hi hat 2" to 1.25" adapter, so it gets locked in there pretty solidly, just obviously not in the right place
So what I ended up with was small images of Jupiter as you can see here. Is this pretty much all I should expect at f/10 or is there something else I can try with my system? Or will solving the Powermate issue and capturing at ~f/25 make a world of difference or will I be better off getting a better, faster camera?(been meaning too for a while but my budget is limited to $400-500
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I should add that I'm not looking to be the next Damian Peach or anything, just want to understand what realistic expectations are and where I can improve
