Misty blurry Jupiter!

matt · #1 19-02-2006, 03:59 PM

I thought with all the great Jupiter images being posted of late I'd offer some balance.

So, for astro dudes young and old, experienced and newbies, here's one featuring full-on rubbish seeing and a misty ol' dew-ridden corrector plate.

Think collimation may also be off?

But at least I've posted my first joops. Things can only get better.

asimov (John) · #2 19-02-2006, 04:44 PM

Misty AND blurry you say? Aaahhh!

That's pretty good actually Matt....Nice details present & great colours! Good stuff!

matt · #3 19-02-2006, 04:50 PM

Thanks Asi

Had to work it pretty hard in wavelets and astraimage to get it to there, but it's OK.

The 9.25 does somehow give richer colour i've noticed.

It'd be great to get seeing like Dennis and Rob have had to see how well she can go, but the collimation and dew control are within my control so there's room for improvement.

It's good fun, though, even if the images look like they were captured by Mr Magoo!!!

Hitchhiker · #4 19-02-2006, 05:17 PM

I beg to differ, Matt!

That's a great first effort on Jupiter.

It won't be long and you'll be taking some stunners, I'm sure! What was your exposure time, how many frames did you stack? Details, please!

matt · #5 19-02-2006, 05:23 PM

Thanks Adam

Sorry for not posting more details but I didn't think the image was good enough to provoke such curiosity?

This ended up being the best 180 frames (hence the noise) from about 1000 captured at 10fps at 1/25th of a sec.

Brightness around 50%, gain about 60% and saturation 100%.

Didn't do anything with gamma.

Tracking wasn't working too well, so plenty of pushing buttons on the Synscan hand controller.

matt · #6 19-02-2006, 05:28 PM

Also...

while capturing both jupiter and saturn we noticed quite an obvious separation of blue and red on opposite limbs of the planets.

There was quite a degree of moisture in the air affecting transparency, which i'm guessing caused this atmospheric diffraction????

Anyone care to comment?

Robert_T · #7 19-02-2006, 05:57 PM

Hey Matt, nice shot, is this really your first Joop? I was working with the neximage for 2-3 months last year before I got anything near this good

and the conditions were better too. You've got the colour worked out, if the seeing settles we can expect something really spectacular.

One tip- drop your exposure time to 1/10th or 1/15 s so you can reduce your gain. You'll remove a heck of a lot of grain and hopefully sharper detail.

cheers,

cjmarsh81 · #8 19-02-2006, 06:13 PM

You do yourself an injustice Matt. I wish I could take images of Jupiter with this amount of detail.

matt · #9 19-02-2006, 06:16 PM

Thanks Rob. That means heaps coming from you, with the images you've been producing.

yep. Definitely my first on the big bloke. I've been set up and ready to go a few times, only to be clouded out. So, I was just mad keen to get anything "on film" and posted, to kick the show off.

Thanks for the tip re: shutter speed. I'd been following some of the other threads which were experimenting with increasing gain so I thought I'd give it a go. Obviously not so good when there are so few frames to process???

I'll follow your advice and hopefully get some better stuff next time.

@cjmarsh81

To be honest cj ... I think I really should be getting better images than this given the gear I'm working with. I'm still coming to terms with it all, actually. I only got the scope and mount in December last year.

Having said that, I'm waiting on really good conditions to really put everything to the test.

Thanks for your interest and kind words

bird (Anthony Wesley) · #10 19-02-2006, 06:32 PM

Hi Matt, that's a very nice first image for Jupiter, well done!

Bird

matt · #11 19-02-2006, 06:42 PM

Thanks Bird. Likewise, that's a boost to get a comment like that from you.

One question: When I'm using the K3CCD tools interface for controlling my capture parameters (fps, shutter speed etc) I can only get the shutter speed down to 1/25th if I've got the frame rate set at 10fps.

Is there any way to get the shutter speed lower, to Rob's recommended 1/10th or 1/15th sec?????

Thanks folks

Robert_T · #12 19-02-2006, 07:20 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by matt

One question: When I'm using the K3CCD tools interface for controlling my capture parameters (fps, shutter speed etc) I can only get the shutter speed down to 1/25th if I've got the frame rate set at 10fps.

Is there any way to get the shutter speed lower, to Rob's recommended 1/10th or 1/15th sec?????

Thanks folks

Hey Matt - I use K3CCD tools too. Just checking where in the program are you attempting to adjust your shutter speed? I use the camera icon that brings up the gain, brightness, gamma, saturation and shutter speed slider bars. At 10fps I can push the shutter speed bar as far to the right as it will go to give 1/10s. I find what you can access here depends a bit on what your gain and other sliders are set to - it may be that with gain set so high it wont allows such as slow shutter speed as 1/10 sec.?

You should also try 5fps when the seeing is good and see if that allows 1/10th sec exposures. Gives you less frames but perhaps a little more detail.

cheers,

matt · #13 19-02-2006, 08:22 PM

Rob

We're using WcCtrl (K3CCDTools webcam control utility) V1.3.34

We don't have a camera icon in the Primary tab.

Shutter speed will not go below 1/25th no matter what the other settings are at. We've tried all variations of brightness, gamma, gain etc

Is there a box that needs checking or unchecking. Have we missed something?

matt · #14 20-02-2006, 06:59 PM

OK

Problem's solved. Much thanks to 1ponders.

It turns out I was in fact capturing at 10fps and 1/10th of a second after all.

Apparantly, for some bizarre reason I'll never understand, even though the WcCtrl utility reads 10fps and 1/25th of a second, those two settings actually achieve a real exposure of 1/10th of a sec. Go figure

You just need to refer to the exposure table at K3's website.

Weird. Really weird.