Finally, after travelling for work the last couple of weeks I'm back home and the weather has started to clear up... I've been hanging out to have a go at Mars so I stayed up late last night.
Conditions ended up as very poor, high haze and a bright nearby moon - only about a dozen stars were visible across the whole sky. Mars was at about 45 degrees altitude and the moon was even lower at about 30 degrees (only just clearing the trees!).
The seeing was reasonably stable but the haze robbed me of a lot of light so I had to use longer exposures.
Overall I'd rate the imaging conditions as 2 - 2.5 / 10. Not good, but I had a go anyway.
The result was not so bad, there's some cloud formations visible near the centre of the disc, the NPH can be seen, the SPC is visible.
The low quality of the raw frames meant I had to process it really hard, apologies to the purists :-)
Details:
10" f/6 newtonian
5x powermate + extender for effective 6x
PGR Dragonfly Express camera, 640x480 16bpp monochrome
Astronomik R,G,B filters
R=G=33ms B=66ms
Captured with Coriander for Linux, processed in Registax, Astra Image
and the GIMP for Windows.
regards, Bird
Edit: Mike Sirois enhanced my images a bit further in Neat Image, so I've replaced
my original image with a new one that includes his enhancements.
Last edited by bird; 22-09-2005 at 02:53 PM.
Reason: new image
G'Day Mike. I love the new camera. It makes marginal 2/10 conditions into 6/10 or 7/10 - there's just no way I could have got this image with my old camera.
Mars will not be good for us Aussies this time around, so I don't have any great expectations to match the guys in the northern hemisphere when they have mars at the zenith and we have it low in the north.
My hopes are mainly on Jupiter and Saturn, and on the Moon. Come February/March next year I hope to be cranking out some really good stuff. I'm using Mars as target practice for the new camera and (in a few weeks) for the new scope.
Hey Anthony, stunning shot, plenty of detail there and this just makes me more envious of you guys with good weather. Jupiter is almost gone now and I am getting planetary fever. Been only getting shots once a month at the moment and at this rate cannot hope to get enough practice before opposition of Mars.
Which camera did you end up getting? Model etc.
Once again, great to see your images here again. Even for 2/10 seeing this image is stunning. Welcome back.
Hi Paul. I read this site every day, so in some ways I never went away :-) I just keep quiet most of the time and enjoy looking at the work you guys are doing.
I bought the Dragonfly Express (otherwise known as the Stupidly Expensive camera) from Point Grey Research (www.ptgrey.com), cost me about $2k all up with shipping and GST.
I know other people who spend 4x that on a deep-sky camera, so I guess I don't feel too bad...
great stuff, bird. you and ice really encourage me to keep having a go. A few years down the track and a real good 5x barlow and i hope to be getting close to these.
great stuff, bird. you and ice really encourage me to keep having a go. A few years down the track and a real good 5x barlow and i hope to be getting close to these.
no selling yourself short!!!
well you just have to take it all in and listen to the man MIKE
For those people (like me!) with different types of monitors, it's hard to get an image that looks good on all of them. e.g. my lcd monitor shows an image to be really crisp but when I compare it on my crt it looks fuzzy.
Anyway, here's the above image processed a bit further, including a monochrome version. If you're on an lcd screen then this might look a bit too far processed but on most crt screens it might look better than the original.
![[1ponders]'s Avatar](../vbiis/customavatars/avatar45_9.gif){kind=avatar}
