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#1
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Jupiter
The astrophotography has been keeping me occupied lately. This
is my first attempt at planetary imaging. Lots to learn, I know. Don't see much astrophotography here so thought I'd share. Taken with a 8" f/10 scope with a 2.5x powermate (like a teleconvertor) giving it an equivalent focal length of around 5000mm. Camera was a DBK21 CCD camera. The dark spot is the shadow of one of the moons, and you can just make out the Great Red Spot at the top. http://piggo.com/~troy/photos/2009/2...er091023_1.jpg All up I'm pretty happy with it. Suspect the scope needs some tweaking of the collimation which should give a sharper image. Will have to try that next time, haven't done it before. -- Troy Piggins |
#2
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Jupiter
On Sat, 24 Oct 2009 01:43:38 +1000, Troy Piggins
wrote: The astrophotography has been keeping me occupied lately. This is my first attempt at planetary imaging. Lots to learn, I know. Don't see much astrophotography here so thought I'd share. Taken with a 8" f/10 scope with a 2.5x powermate (like a teleconvertor) giving it an equivalent focal length of around 5000mm. Camera was a DBK21 CCD camera. The dark spot is the shadow of one of the moons, and you can just make out the Great Red Spot at the top. http://piggo.com/~troy/photos/2009/2...er091023_1.jpg All up I'm pretty happy with it. Suspect the scope needs some tweaking of the collimation which should give a sharper image. Will have to try that next time, haven't done it before. Much depends too on "seeing" conditions. The atmospheric stability. Most times you just have to wait and hope for the best days. The very same perfectly collimated optics can provide a draw-dropping 3D-looking view of Saturn one day, and an irregular mushy blob the next. Look into the sharpening techniques that web-cam astrophotographers use, by combining details from many many frames to virtually look through the turbulent atmosphere, capturing and combining those bits of each image that are stable and sharp. You might also try stopping down the aperture of your telescope during bad seeing conditions. A larger aperture means that your telescope is trying to image through larger lower-frequency areas of atmospheric turbulence. If the turbulence that night is mostly of the lower-frequency variety it will help to filter it out. I keep a 6" mask handy for those times to put on my 16" scope. Apodizing masks also cure things on some days for planetary imaging. |
#3
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Jupiter
(silly typo correction)
On Sat, 24 Oct 2009 01:43:38 +1000, Troy Piggins wrote: The astrophotography has been keeping me occupied lately. This is my first attempt at planetary imaging. Lots to learn, I know. Don't see much astrophotography here so thought I'd share. Taken with a 8" f/10 scope with a 2.5x powermate (like a teleconvertor) giving it an equivalent focal length of around 5000mm. Camera was a DBK21 CCD camera. The dark spot is the shadow of one of the moons, and you can just make out the Great Red Spot at the top. http://piggo.com/~troy/photos/2009/2...er091023_1.jpg All up I'm pretty happy with it. Suspect the scope needs some tweaking of the collimation which should give a sharper image. Will have to try that next time, haven't done it before. Much depends too on "seeing" conditions. The atmospheric stability. Most times you just have to wait and hope for the best days. The very same perfectly collimated optics can provide a jaw-dropping 3D-looking view of Saturn one day, and an irregular mushy blob the next. Look into the sharpening techniques that web-cam astrophotographers use, by combining details from many many frames to virtually look through the turbulent atmosphere, capturing and combining those bits of each image that are stable and sharp. You might also try stopping down the aperture of your telescope during bad seeing conditions. A larger aperture means that your telescope is trying to image through larger lower-frequency areas of atmospheric turbulence. If the turbulence that night is mostly of the lower-frequency variety it will help to filter it out. I keep a 6" mask handy for those times to put on my 16" scope. Apodizing masks also cure things on some days for planetary imaging. |
#5
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Jupiter
* Damn 35 F Rain - Staying Warm Inside Is Winning Today wrote :
* Troy Piggins wrote : [---=| Quote block shrinked by t-prot: 11 lines snipped |=---] http://piggo.com/~troy/photos/2009/2...er091023_1.jpg All up I'm pretty happy with it. Suspect the scope needs some tweaking of the collimation which should give a sharper image. Will have to try that next time, haven't done it before. Much depends too on "seeing" conditions. The atmospheric stability. Most times you just have to wait and hope for the best days. The very same perfectly collimated optics can provide a draw-dropping 3D-looking view of Saturn one day, and an irregular mushy blob the next. Look into the sharpening techniques that web-cam astrophotographers use, by combining details from many many frames to virtually look through the turbulent atmosphere, capturing and combining those bits of each image that are stable and sharp. Yes, this image was stacked from around 2500 frames of an avi file using Registax. Suspect that's the technique you're referring to. You might also try stopping down the aperture of your telescope during bad seeing conditions. A larger aperture means that your telescope is trying to image through larger lower-frequency areas of atmospheric turbulence. If the turbulence that night is mostly of the lower-frequency variety it will help to filter it out. I keep a 6" mask handy for those times to put on my 16" scope. Apodizing masks also cure things on some days for planetary imaging. How does one stop down the aperture of a fixed aperture scope? The bare scope is f/10. With the 2.5x powermate it becomes an equivalent f/25. I haven't heard of people using those masks you're referring to. I'll look into it. Thanks. -- Troy Piggins |
#6
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Jupiter
* Rich wrote :
On Oct 23, 11:43Â*am, Troy Piggins wrote: [---=| Quote block shrinked by t-prot: 14 lines snipped |=---] tweaking of the collimation which should give a sharper image. Will have to try that next time, haven't done it before. You need at least 25,000mm to really shoot Jupiter. Nice shot at 5000mm though. Anthony Wesley, the guy who discovered the that most recent impact scar on Jupiter, takes these sort of shots with an effective focal length of around 9000mm. http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/a...4&d=1256210105 I'd be extremely happy if I can get anywhere near as good as that. Have you ever tried to image with something of the sort of focal lengths you're suggesting with back-yard amatuer gear? I'd love to see examples. -- Troy Piggins |
#7
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Jupiter
Troy Piggins wrote:
The astrophotography has been keeping me occupied lately. This is my first attempt at planetary imaging. Lots to learn, I know. Don't see much astrophotography here so thought I'd share. Taken with a 8" f/10 scope with a 2.5x powermate (like a teleconvertor) giving it an equivalent focal length of around 5000mm. Camera was a DBK21 CCD camera. The dark spot is the shadow of one of the moons, and you can just make out the Great Red Spot at the top. http://piggo.com/~troy/photos/2009/2...er091023_1.jpg All up I'm pretty happy with it. Suspect the scope needs some tweaking of the collimation which should give a sharper image. Will have to try that next time, haven't done it before.Nice one, Troy. Beats my webcam-through-ETX attempt (of ten years ago): http://faxmentis.org/html/jpg/jupiter-7-11-99.jpg Since yours is 2500 stacked images, how come the moon is a dot, not a line? :-) -- Jeff R. |
#8
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Jupiter
* Jeff R. wrote :
Troy Piggins wrote: [---=| Quote block shrinked by t-prot: 11 lines snipped |=---] http://piggo.com/~troy/photos/2009/2...er091023_1.jpg All up I'm pretty happy with it. Suspect the scope needs some tweaking of the collimation which should give a sharper image. Will have to try that next time, haven't done it before.Nice one, Troy. Beats my webcam-through-ETX attempt (of ten years ago): http://faxmentis.org/html/jpg/jupiter-7-11-99.jpg Still, not bad Since yours is 2500 stacked images, how come the moon is a dot, not a line? :-) They were taken over 90 seconds Not sure, but suspect even that may have been too long. Maybe should have kept it down to 60 secs or so. Jupiter spins so fast you have to get in and get out real quick, so you're using as fast a fps as you can get. Some guys are shooting 45-60fps. The avi file size I took for this was 1.5GB! Just to get a measly little 15kB image! -- Troy Piggins |
#9
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Jupiter
Troy Piggins wrote:
* Jeff R. wrote : Troy Piggins wrote: [---=| Quote block shrinked by t-prot: 11 lines snipped |=---] http://piggo.com/~troy/photos/2009/2...er091023_1.jpg All up I'm pretty happy with it. Suspect the scope needs some tweaking of the collimation which should give a sharper image. Will have to try that next time, haven't done it before.Nice one, Troy. Beats my webcam-through-ETX attempt (of ten years ago): http://faxmentis.org/html/jpg/jupiter-7-11-99.jpg Still, not bad Since yours is 2500 stacked images, how come the moon is a dot, not a line? :-) They were taken over 90 seconds Not sure, but suspect even that may have been too long. Maybe should have kept it down to 60 secs or so. Jupiter spins so fast you have to get in and get out real quick, so you're using as fast a fps as you can get. Some guys are shooting 45-60fps. The avi file size I took for this was 1.5GB! Just to get a measly little 15kB image! Cooled camera? Hand or auto-guided? Suburban location? Country? (fun, idd'n it!) -- Jeff R. |
#10
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Jupiter
* Jeff R. wrote :
Troy Piggins wrote: [---=| Quote block shrinked by t-prot: 19 lines snipped |=---] that may have been too long. Maybe should have kept it down to 60 secs or so. Jupiter spins so fast you have to get in and get out real quick, so you're using as fast a fps as you can get. Some guys are shooting 45-60fps. The avi file size I took for this was 1.5GB! Just to get a measly little 15kB image! Cooled camera? Nope. This one: http://www.theimagingsource.com/en_U...yer/dbk21au04/ I'm considering (don't tell my wife) a cooled CCD for longer exposure, deep sky stuff. They're the duck's nuts. But won't be getting the top of the line ones. They go for $10k or multiples thereof. Reckon something like this will do me: http://web.aanet.com.au/~gama/QHY8.html Hand or auto-guided? No guiding. Not for 90 secs or so. Mount was just tracking sidereal rate on its own. Suburban location? Country? Centre of Brisbane. Don't think you could find a much more light polluted location in Queensland Fortunately light pollution doesn't seem to affect planetary imaging so much because the targets are so bright. I'm talking Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, Mars, even Mercury here. For Uranus and Neptune you use more deep sky imaging techniques I think - longer exposures and light pollution does come into it a bit. This sort of stuff it's more about atmospheric conditions, the jetstream, and scope focus and collimation. I have yet to come to terms with tweaking all that. (fun, idd'n it!) Oh, ya! -- Troy Piggins |
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