Ving: those images were taken with a Sony bullet camera plugged into a panasonic camcorder.
David: I was only using a 3x barlow for those images. No ep's and the lense from the camera was removed. Hmmm I just thought, the distance between the Barlow lense and the CCD will affect the focus as well as the distance from the secondary mirror to the barlow, right??? I seemed to get good focus on themoonhowever so it can' tbe that bad.
I could see the bands when looking through the ep but they faded in and out. After reprocessing the images I can clearly see the bands in the photographs. I found the wavelets section had a big impact on image quality. Setting wavelets 6,5 and 4 to 30,20 and 10 respectively did wonders. I played around a little more from there but only got small improvements.
I tried the star test thing with that link. I think the seeing is about 2-3 but I would have thought it would be better than that (no wind, no clouds, no moon but in dark backyard of Perth). Interestingly the abberations seem to form 3 prongs from the center rather than a full circle. Does this mean I have alignment problems? This is meant to be done focused on the star right?
Still waiting on a laptop to get the logitech webcam going. I installed the K3CCD software on the desktop and had play. I can change the exposure and a heap of other setting so hopefully I can get better images even though the resolution of this camera is much lower than the bullet camera.
Also brett, seeing is mainly to do with the quality of the image / view. The word transparency helps describe the prescence of clouds / moon etc.
Ie you can have a great seeing night, ie the planet or star does not shift or bulge or go out of focus, but then clouds come in and stuff up the view. so seeing is great, transparency is bad.
It also sounds like the scope is out of collimation (aligmnent).
You find a nice bright star at least 60 degrees above the horizon and then slightly defocus in both directions. This is called a star test. the defocussed image has to be perfectly concentric.
So seeing is only related to how the atmosphere affects the view via that 'heat haze' effect. Assuming tranprancy is good ie no clouds etc. Is seeing a result of temperature gradients in the atmosphere?
The three prongs I see are in an even pattern ~120degs apart but one is smaller. The "defocused" star seems to produce a rounded triangle pattern so it does look like the scope is out of collimation.
I found a description on the net how to align a reflector (http://www.btow.com.au/pdf/tips/Collimation.pdf). I've done the daylight basic alignment and now need to do a star test to get the fine alignment. Will be very interesting to see the difference. It did need a bit of movement in both the primary and secondary mirrors.
I also managed to get the webcam going for a short while before the batteris in the laptop died. Not long enough however to get any video though. The resolution is really bad so I'm not too hopeful for the webcam.
the problem with this is going to be that i cant adjust very much in mpeg mode. it might just get burnt out.
i'll give it a shot tho... otherwise its just a case of getting the most out of single shots
i may very well have reached my limit
clouds cleared and i got some shots off (10-12 shots). they are all the same size so would it be worth stcking them?
the seeing was pretty bad but i think i might have a couple of ok ones in there... Bec took over the computer last night so i didnt get to process them
got some shots lastnight... seeing was like 3/10 tho. visually thru my 7.5 i could make out the belts (as a shape) but zero detail in the blets.... snapped some shot anyhow. looks like i have been plagued with bad seeing for the entire comp
snapped a couple of jewel box shots too
Chrissyo, have you thought about converting your Avies to individual bmps using Virtualdub and then either running them through through Registax as bmps or trying bird's ppmcentre then through Registax?
I don't know what is causing your ellipsoid shaped planet except for the movement of Jupiter across the field of view and Registax has to "chase" it. If you can work ppmcentre it will center each image first so that Registax is not chasing the image. Bird, DaveP or Mike might be able to give more info on how it works and how to process using it.
I have a new idea about what might be causing the skewed shots - the camera is on a bit of an angle when afocally held to the eyepiece by my bracket. I assume this contributes to it, as well as skews the colours? I was considering taking the tripod out last night to push the bracket up a little bit to see if it helped, but the jetstream stopped me going out.
As for vitrualdub/ppmcentre, seeing as tomorrow is a holiday, I might give them a try. I've never used virtualdub, but I've given ppmcentre a quick go. Tomorrow looks like a processing day =) (Plus, lets hope there are some gaps in the clouds later tonight before midnight to sneak in a quick last image or two )
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