Last night was amazing! I was able to get my 10" dob (no tracking) operating at 1171.875X Magnification (according to my calculator) and the image on my video camera still looked quite wonderful. I decided to go for Saturn in one avi, and its moons in another using the low light feature. I processed both in Registax, and used photoshop to stick them together (and slightly touch up contrast etc). Here is my result! I hope you all enjoy, I am quite proud of it (no more wanting tracking for a while anyway ).
How big was the avi?
How many frames did you end up stacking?
Could you post a pic of a single frame to show what you started with please.
Is there any chance of you letting me know what your wavelet settings were as well.
The avi was 891 frames.
I stacked about the 100 best in this shot.
The first frame (left) is the best raw frame, and the second (right) is one from about the middle and represents about the average I guess.
I can't remember exactly what the Wavelet settings where, but I think I had it at about 70 in 6, and 50 in 5, and left the others at 1.
Lol Ken, you'll be far surpassing this in no time with your new EQ
And thanks everyone else for your kind words
Also, I've had a new mini-breakthrough sorta thing.. I'll need all your help for this one... Whilst checking over the frames etc for jjjnettie, I decided to go and reprocess it to see what I could do. And I think I might have JUST managed to capture the little faint inner ring (its name starts with an E doesn't it? Ench??). I might just be excited and seeing some slight smudges, but you be the judge.
The uploaded image is about 300 or 400X zoomed in.. tell me if you think the smudges in there are that inner ring (espessiouly look at the right hand side ring). Thoughts?
Excellent result! Looks like you had some great seeing, and even the raw frames look excellent.
The inner ring is called the "Crepe" ring, and yes you did capture it. It's fairly easy to capture to crepe ring, as long as transparency is good, and you also need a fairly healthy gamma and brightness capture setting.
You can see it on my recent Saturn pic posted the other day.
It looks like video cameras are doing a great job for non-tracked dobbies!
brilliant , now this is something I've been wanting to try for a while, but always get carried away at the scope and never remember to try for the moons as well - can you describe the low light feature you mentioned?
Mike: Unfortunately, the avi is just over 1 gig in size. So I wouldn't be able to upload it anywhere.
Robert: The low light feature is basicly a 'night mode'. All you do is flick a switch and its on (so its nothing overly technical). Its just designed for filming at night time, and the image comes out in black and white. Sorry if this isn't a very good explanation. I'm not really to sure on how to describe it
I got it down to 300mb by zipping. However, there may be an easier way.. when I import the video from my camera, I first use Windows Movie Maker to split the nights work. This saves the movie in wmv format (I then use a seperate program to convert to avi. I could download another program to go straight to avi, but I'm too lazy). The wmv file for this saturn is only 14 mb, so if someone can suggest somewhere to upload it, you can download it and convert it yourself.
).
Wow excellent
