First light of the ToUcam

[iceman (Mike)]

As I said in the general chat forum, was finally able to give the ToUcam a run last night, first time having the laptop after having the ToUcam for a week.

No moon or planets, so tried on Rigel in Orion.

Was able to find the star on the CCD chip fairly easily by bringing it way out of focus and cranking up the gain. Once I found the big donut circle it was easy enough to keep it in the FOV.

I tried with the 2x barlow as well, and was surprised that I could also get it in the FOV of the chip using the same method, although it was quite a bit harder, and much harder to KEEP it in the FOV as I try and nudge the dob ever so slightly

I'm yet to process the images.. I dunno how it will come out, but I was just practising the technique, hoping to be able to image Saturn this morning.
But alas, I bring rain on 42degree days!

Maybe tomorrow morning..

I'll post the pictures of Rigel once i'm done processing them. I'm going to try and join a few avi's together - again, practising the technique I hope to use with the planets.

[mch62 (Mark)]

Hi ice , yes finding and keeping an object on the laptop can be tricky considering the FOV of the ToUcam is about that of a 4.5mm eyepiece.
What I do , as I have the gain right down so images are dimmer on the screen but less noise , is to use an el cheapo Chinese 70mm refractor as a guide scope. It only cost $100 but give an excellent image
considering .
I use a 25mm eyepiece and the G.S. has a FR of 900mm. This give a reasonable magnification but allows for a reasonable field of view.
I than focus the main scope and ToUcam on a bright star and tighten the focuser screw so it won't move.
You then just follow the object or guide star with the G.S. to keep it on the laptop .
I know you have a Dob but most nights I don't worry about polar aligning my mount and with a 4x Powermate and a 1900mm FR it does not take much for the image to drift off the screen and it can be hard to find again .
That's what I do , some people swap the ToUcam over with a wide field eyepiece and than back , but you have to refocus each time and you can't track it that way.

Mark

[iceman (Mike)]

yeh I wouldn't mind a guidescope, or maybe a flip-mirror thingo to be able to have both in the focusser and be able to track that way.

I've now processed my avi's from last night.. I had many avi's from the session, each one trying to put the star at the right-hand side of the field so I could capture as many frames as possible before it drifted out of the FOV.

I used "Bink and Smacker" to combine 4 avi's into 1 longer one (>500Meg ), and then used registax to align and stack them. When it moved onto each new avi in teh sequence I simply had to realign and off it went.

Here is the stacked result, no other processing except crop.



I'm not sure why the colour is so blue, I think it's got to do with the settings on the capture, I didn't adjust the white balance, colour, saturation, brightness or anything. I left them all because I had a hard enough time getting the star in the FOV to start capturing, let alone spend a couple of passes getting the colours right! But when I do it with Saturn i'll obviously have to take more time getting the other settings right.

Here's a single frame from the original avi to use as a comparison! Oh and teh conditions were TERRIBLE!

Rigel was just above my house, low on the horizon, it was hot and windy, the scope hadn't cooled down and all the stars were twinkling badly. I'm guessing that's the cause for the little egg on top of the star

The diffraction spikes look nice though



Looking forward to trying it again tomorrow morning, hopefully the weather will cooperate this time!!

[seeker372011 (Narayan)]

nice result for first light!

[mch62 (Mark)]

Good go there Ice .
I noticed there is a flare off to the top of the Star. You called an egg

Is there somthing on the mirror or diagonal or spider you can see might be causing that?
In the raw frame it actually looks retangular and is lines up with a difraction spike.
Have you done a star test recently and does it show up in that ?
Mark

[iceman (Mike)]

yeh i'm not sure what it is, I didn't notice it when I had the star out of focus as a big donut, but I wasn't really paying attention because I used my hartman mask straight away to focus it.

I'll pay more attention next chance I get and do a star test. I can't think of what it would be, as there's nothing except my spider veins and secondary that it could be.

I'll have a look tonight.