The DBK is one great camera Steve! Nothing to do with me, lol.
Ok all jokes aside - I've spent considerable time with the DBK over the last few years & I simply love it. It loves oversampling Steve. Even in so-so seeing. I simply won't shoot at anything less than F30 with the C11 unless it's 3/10 seeing or less.
Hope you don't mind me asking..... are you calculating your FL from your finished image size? And are you splitting the RGB channels to work on them separately before recombining?
With some minor adjustments to alt/az after a two star alignment with the argo navis Saturn is pretty much centred and will track reasonable well with minor adjustments every few minutes. I then swap out the EP and introduce the powermates up to 5 x. This is of course where the fun begins - is doesn't matter how long I can keep the planet centred, once I introduce the DBK, its never on the chip. It can take me only a few minutes to half an hour to find the thing but once it's there it stays put (with the 4 or 5 x powermate) with some minor adjustments every minute or so. I'm assuming it's not an issue to make 1 or two adjustment while recording a 4 or 5 minute Avi at 15 or 30fps.
Hope you don't mind me asking..... are you calculating your FL from your finished image size? And are you splitting the RGB channels to work on them separately before recombining?
Cheers
I don't really worry about calculating anything these days Steve (I used to though), I'm more of a "lets see if this works" kind of guy now. I mainly work with the live view histogram, as to what FL/FR I can go to. After saying that the seeing is really what dictates to what you can & can't do.
I no longer split the channels to work on them seperately, no.
I make sure my Telrad is adjusted and I use high magnification with a 9mm Nagler in the barlow to get everything centered before the switch over to the camera. Also, the focus for the eyepiece is different for the camera. I have a motorized focuser. So, I already know where my focus needs to be before I make the switch. Even if you don't have a motorized focuser, you can guestimate by approximate turns or some similar method. Having close focus makes it much easier too. Hope this helps get image on chip more easily.
Thanks for the valuable tips Paul. I use a similar process, although I don't have the motorized focuser. But I do know (approx.) where the different focuser length needs to be for each barlow/powermate. One thing you have remided me about though is perhaps to offset my telrad so the planet lines up with one of the 12, 3, 6 or 9 o'clock gaps in the inner telrad ring rather than where I have it at the mo - roughly centered (but often there is no planet on my laptop screen). So better use of the telrad may help.
I'm using the standard 50X9 finder & wouldn't be without it, despite me having to tweek it before every imaging run. They do move around a bit. I spend quite a bit of time getting it aligned @ F30 as I think it's worth it, as I can point at Saturn straight away with the 3X barlow & have it land on the camera chip.
Good advice John - I only use the finder on my GM-8 mount but have constructed a mounting for the finder on the side of my telrad so I will go back to the use of the finder to see if things improve. Thanks.
Great image Steve... the weather up here has been a bit crook for a while, and even if it were fine, I drool over having larger aperture. Thanks for sharing.
