Saturn & Jupiter - 2nd January from tassie

davidpretorius · #1 02-01-2006, 03:24 PM

Hi, after two weeks of getting the powermate, i was able to use it in fair conditions. lovely and dark, but drastically falling temps, meant the mirror never caught up to the ambient and by 5am was still 3 degrees different (1.5 to 4.5)

Anyway I did:

saturn @10fps 1671 out of 2400 frames in normal mode
saturn @5fps 400 out of 1200 frames stacked raw mode
jupiter @ 10fps 1372 out of 2400 frames normal mode

due to temps, seeing wasn't good. i could not see the cassini division through the 5mm vixen.

i know jupiter is still too low, but it was pleasing to see the bands of jupiter through the 5mm vixen and also very occassionally with the 5mm vixen through the 5x powermate!

I have only stacked the images, i had a quick rip at astra image, but gave up in disgust.

Please feel free to further process them

As an aside, i have got the link happening with my tech 2000 dob driver II and the laptop. i now have a two star alignment and goto. it needs to be refined, but she jumped around the sky nicely.

Only problem is that the parallel port is needed and that is taken up by long exposure wires for the toucam, so 2 computers are needed???

Nice to be back out there!

asimov (John) · #2 02-01-2006, 09:55 PM

Good one mate. Glad your finally getting out there amongst it all again. Darn seeing conditions are playing havoc with our imaging hey!

acropolite (Phil) · #3 02-01-2006, 10:31 PM

Good results Dave considering the conditions. The jetstream was raging and transparency was not at all good. I've noticed that, over the past few days even though the sky is clear, the stars are much duller than usual and are frequently fading in and out, even though there isn't any upper atmospheric cloud apparent.

rumples riot · #4 02-01-2006, 11:03 PM

Dave I won't blow wind up your you know what. I sometimes get results like this and usually just dump them. No amount of processing can really help. Take heart in the fact that the seeing will change and it will get better. Better luck next time.

RB (Andrew) · #5 03-01-2006, 01:50 AM

Goodonya Dave,

You've done well to get these, considering the temps were changing so much then no wonder the scope currents were all over the place.
Keep at it dude, practice makes for a great image in the end.

Is there a way I can download the first one(Saturn) AVI and last one (Jupiter) AVI, i'd like to have a go?