Hi Peter,
the image is created from an avi movie.
The camera is monochrome video camera - the ASI120MM (from ZWO optical). I also used a manual filter wheel (from ZWO) loaded with Astronomik RGB filters.
The telescope is a Skywatcher 12inch dobsonian on an autotracking mount. Because I'm taking videos, the tracking only has to be good enough to keep the planet on the chip - it doesn't matter if it moves around a bit as the stacking software will take care of aligning them afterwards. The tracking mount does this job adequately provided its aligned properly. In theory, I guess you could take the video without tracking but it would be very frustrating to keep the image on the chip ....
The reason I went down this road is that I already had the manual version of the scope and knew it to have good optics. So for around $1000 I could buy the goto-tracking upgrade. Ofcourse this type of mount would NOT be suitable for deep-sky photography though. Getting this sort of apeture mounted on an equatorial would have cost alot more.
As for image details: four runs were taken each through a different filter L + RGB. I took around 1600 frames for the L (lumionence) and around 700 each for RGB. I then stacked the best 50% frames from each in Autostakert and combined them into photoshop to produce final image.
This page:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/42079393@N05/8288781750/
was one of the people who convinced me that an autotraking dob can do good solar system work. I think the one used here is the 10" version.
I hope this helps,
bye for now,
Paul.
). It's only the second colour image I've ever taken so I was very pleased to atleast vaguely capture the hex-storm at the pole.
