Jupiter shots

Screwdriverone (Chris) · #1 24-02-2008, 06:47 PM

Hi All,

A whole night of clear (ish) cloud free skies, who'd have thought???

I managed to stay up for Jupiter's arrival and did some practice with my afocal Camera adapter and both my cameras. I am getting better, but I think I may need a prime focus adapter to get a bit bigger and more resolution.

While waiting for Jupiter, I took some of the moon, which turned out OK.

Practice, practice and more practice...

Chris

Ahh, yeah, sorry for posting this in the general chat, no sleep = brain fade. Thanks for moving it.

peter_4059 (Peter) · #2 24-02-2008, 07:00 PM

Nice shot of the moon - plenty of detail. Were the jupiter shots single frames or stacked AVI's?

Screwdriverone (Chris) · #3 24-02-2008, 07:13 PM

Hi Peter,

Thanks. I thought the moon shots came out well.

For the Jupiter shots I tried single shots with 10 second self timer on the camera to stop the jiggles and set it to 0.7 sec exposure with auto white balance. The AVI ones are of similar quality (perhaps a bit less due to the 640X480 res on video) and single frames look a lot like the stills I took.

From memory, the cam kept saying 1/4 at F5.2 on the screen when taking a shot in auto mode.

Chris

peter_4059 (Peter) · #4 24-02-2008, 07:41 PM

have you tried stacking the avi's using Registax?

Screwdriverone (Chris) · #5 24-02-2008, 08:13 PM

I dont know if I can get enough light out of my scope at 250x with the 2.5 X Barlow and the 10mm lens. These shots were done at 125x using the 20mm and the camera at full 3x optical zoom (digital zoom is crap) and even then, I thought the amount of details were a little disappointing considering the 50-100 shots I took.

I think there may be a camera T ring adapter I can use for the Kodak DX4530 as it has a screw thread around the inside of the lens bit so this may allow me to get a little closer and with less stuffing around than with the camera mount. Lining it up and changing the eyepieces is a pain!.

Having said that, the results arent bad for a $20 adapter and a $250 camera, when lined up, its like having a TV screen on the eyepiece and I can swing the scope around (for Solar System objects only) and target using the screen and the finderscope.

At 7MP the stills should show more detail than the video setting at 640x480 pixels so I dont know if using Registax is on the cards just yet.... Windows movie maker shows me all the frames I have and I can peel these out and fiddle with them quite easily for now. Thanks for the suggestion tho!

Screwdriverone (Chris) · #6 24-02-2008, 08:22 PM

A few more of my moon shots while I feel like showing off...

Chris

Matty P (Matt) · #7 24-02-2008, 08:26 PM

Great Moon images Chris, not bad at all. Well done.

Screwdriverone (Chris) · #8 24-02-2008, 08:48 PM

Hi Matty,

Thanks, the seeing of the moon was really good last night.

I havent modified these images apart from cropping and resizing to get them down to under the 200kb attachment size, so the little Pentax Optio S7 is quite good for this sort of work. Its nice to have a real life, do it yourself moon shot on your desktop to show the kids...

Now if I only knew what the craters names are, ha ha ha...

Chris

Screwdriverone (Chris) · #9 25-02-2008, 05:04 PM

I took Peter's advice and had a go at using Registax, fumbled my way around a bit and cleaned up some images from the avi file I took.

See what you think, I reckon there is more detail shown on this frame from the AVI than on the still that I first posted? Now for the Kodak - hopefully

Chris

peter_4059 (Peter) · #10 27-02-2008, 07:14 AM

Chris,

Stacking an AVI usually give a better result than a single frame because you increase the signal to noise ratio of the image. The wavelets function can also do an amazing job of bringing out details in what seems like a fuzzy image.

Registax takes a bit of getting used to but even the automatic processing option does a pretty good job. I haven't found any good instructions for how to use wavelets but usually just experiment to find a combination that works adjusting one at a time. When I find a good combination I save the setting and apply this as a starting point next time.

Iceman has posted a good article on planetry image processing that involves extra steps and you will need Astraimage or something similar to do the RGB combine but you can see how he applies Registax to the monochrome images in the article. I think this link will work..
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/index.p...63,306,0,0,1,0

Peter