Saturn 4/26

After a disappointing evening last night with the clouds, tonight we had a decent evening to photograph.  I shot some video using the 70mm and the 114mm reflector.  I believe the reflector is not collimated properly.  The focus was bad, and inward and outward focus was not correct, with a lot of coma and distortion.  However I'm somewhat pleased with the refractor images.  Here they are:

 The first 3 were captured using Sharpcap, the other 2 were captured in WxAstroCapture.  Apparently I dont have the saturation in the 2nd program quite right, they were very "green", I touched them up somewhat in photoshop.  It is interesting however, as to the difference in sharpness.  I did not touch focus whatsoever between the 3rd image and the 4th and 5th.

I'm glad the weather finally broke to the point that I was able to photograph.  Everything appears to be working pretty well, the dew heater did its job, as the car windows were covered in dew, and so was the unheated parts of the telescope.  It didnt take long for the dew to settle, but the lens was nice and dry the entire time.

Dew Heater & the Clouds

Went out and found a clear sky, so I packed up the telescope and set it up for another Saturn shot.  This time, I swapped the scopes on the mount and attached the 70mm to the mount.  Finished the dew heater tonight, and built some cradles for the 2 refractors over the weekend. to make it easier to swap scopes.

The stuff worked perfectly, the dew heater is warming things up nicely, possibly too nicely.  I'm going to have to build some kinda controller, which wont be too difficult.  I powered the heater directly off of a 12V battery, and it was getting much too warm.

Anyway, with it all set up, I found Saturn, inserted the barlow, and did some fine focusing, and just as I was ready to shoot, Saturn disappeared from the screen.  Looked up and a massive wall of clouds moved in from the west.  This has happened to me more than I can count.  It has been raining continuously for the last week with the exception of one evening, and when I saw stars tonight, I got my hopes up for some nice Saturn photos.  If I had another 15 minutes, I would have pictures here instead of me sitting here rambling and complaining about the weather....

Oh well, such is life in Northeast Ohio!

New Infrared Blocking Filter

Received an infrared blocking filter on Friday, and waited for the first clear day to try it out.  I really wanted to try photographing the moon, but being it is waning, it rises too late now.  Saturn has always been difficult for me, so I figured I'd try Saturn again with the filter.

The transparency was bad, but the planet was visible.  I couldnt detect too much variation with the seeing.  As always, the haze illuminated the area around the planet, and as you can see from the various images the rings are not very well defined.  However, take a peek at the body of the planet.  It seems there is much more contrast with the IR block filter installed in the camera.

This is the result of the stacking (198 frames).

After some green removal in photoshop, then some wavelet sharpening, and the elimination of the gray background in iris, this is what I came up with.

I  then thought about splitting the RGB by saving the image as a .fit, loading each in Gimp and converting each to a jpg.  The results of the 3 monochrome images representing each of the colors is presented here:

This is the red channel

This is the green channel

This is the blue channel

Notice how dark the NEB appears in each of these images.  I dont think I have ever resolved the NEB to this extent without the filter.  It will be interesting as to the effect of the filter on the moon and other planets when I'm able to photograph them.

Gassendi

I believe this to be Gassendi and Mare Humorum.  Unfortunately thats what happens sometimes when you just look around on the moon looking for what would look like a good picture.  Thing is, I had to look on my wall map, and as best I can tell, the crater on top is Gassendi.  It is near the terminator when the moon is 11 days, 10 hours old.

Eudoxus and Calippus & Montes Caucasus

Here is another image in my mountain range series, Montes Caudasus, including Eudoxus and Calippus.

[Logitech Webcam C160]
Resolution=640x480
Frame Rate (fps)=10.00
Colour Space / Compression=I420
Exposure=-6
Brightness=190
Contrast=38
Saturation=0
Sharpness=0
WhiteBalance=5640
BacklightCompensation=0
Gain=0

Plato & Montes Alpes

4/13 I took a bunch of video of different areas of the moon.  This one is of Plato  and Montes Alpes.  Cassini crater and Aristillus are also shown in Mare Imbrium

 [Logitech Webcam C160]
Resolution=640x480
Frame Rate (fps)=10.00
Colour Space / Compression=I420
Exposure=-6
Brightness=190
Contrast=38
Saturation=0
Sharpness=0
WhiteBalance=5640
BacklightCompensation=0
Gain=0

Copernicus Area

Had a long photography session this evening.  Shot probably an hour's worth of AVI's.  There is enough there to keep me busy for a few days.  I'll post different areas of the moon that I had photographed in the next several days.  However, not to leave you hanging, I'll put up a couple of images right now:

Here are the camera settings for this image:
[Logitech Webcam C160]
Resolution=640x480
Frame Rate (fps)=5.00
Colour Space / Compression=RGB24
Exposure=-3
Brightness=166
Contrast=58
Saturation=0
Sharpness=0
WhiteBalance=5640
BacklightCompensation=0
Gain=0
Taken with the red filter.

Here is another from the same AVI with a little heavier processing and different stacking arrangement:

 I'm not sure which I like better.

Processing done in Registax 6.  No other processing was done on these images.   There were 500 frames taken, and I cutoff to 95% quality.

One thing I will make mention before I forget:  I did some work on the clock drive before these images were taken.  One of the intermediate gears was loose and wobbling, which I tightened up, and the tracking shows much less movement now.  I believe the clock drive is tweaked as best I can make it, the images were steady on the screen.  Seeing was about a 6 on a scale of 0 to 10.

Here is an image from a different avi:

 Here are the details on this one:

[Logitech Webcam C160]Resolution=640x480
Frame Rate (fps)=10.00
Colour Space / Compression=I420
Exposure=-6
Brightness=190
Contrast=38
Saturation=0
Sharpness=0
WhiteBalance=5640
BacklightCompensation=0
Gain=0

There is less contrast on this one, it needs a little more work, but its too late tonight to work on it.

Rupes Altai

Another mountain range, Rupes Altai, near Mare Nectaris.  The large crater at the top is Catharina.  Again, I used the green filter on the 127mm refractor operating with the 2X barlow, effective focal length 1400mm.

I will be photographing more mountain ranges, and will do so next time without the filter, as the images from last night came out much better quality.


As a bonus, here's another that I took tonight...

Top O' the Moon

Mare Serenitatis Mosaic

Wanted to shoot some mountians tonight, so what better subject than Mare Serenitatis.  Bordered on the northwest  by Montes Caucasus, and to the southwest by Montes Haemus.

The segments consist of various numbers of frames stacked in Registax 6.  Photographed with the green filter, and the images arent as good as I'd liked.  Used the barlow lens to get up close.  Here it is....

Yesterday's images were taken with no filters, and I probably should have not used any tonight, but I wanted to see what the difference is.

Also, I rebuilt my home made focuser on the 127mm refractor (which these images have come from).  The one I had was too short, and I had to use my diagonal to get focus.  I added 6 inches to the optical path, using 2" pvc pipe as the extension.  I find that I do not need as much travel on the drawtube as I need for the 70mm.  Even though the focal length is about the same, apparently the faster 127mm requires less travel on the drawtube to focus all of my eyepieces and camera.

6-Day Old Moon

I was so impressed with the 3 day old moon, I imaged the moon again on my next clear sky, which happened to be when the moon was 6 days old.  I made a number of images, with and without the clock drive.  I made a modification in the clock drive mount, putting the stepper motor on grommets to reduce vibration, but I may have made things worse.  I'll let you decide...  The telescope used was the 127mm refractor.

This is with the clock drive off, using unstacked individual frames.  In all cases, I used 5 frames per second in the AVI, processing in Registax 6, wavelets, de-ringing and gamma adjustment.  Some touch up brightness, etc done in photoshop.

The next image uses the clock drive, running at least 50 stacked frames per segment in Registax, with similar wavelet and deringing processing.  Processing similar to above image.

Before I took these 2 images at low resolution - camera 640X480, but with no barlow, I was getting a feel for the focusing and camera settings with and without the barlow.  The images with the barlow was so sharp, I had to snap some avi's.  Here are a couple of images of the Mare Nectarus area:

 

 

These 3 images of Mare Nectarus were taken using various numbers of frames stacked, the 2nd image, using a red filter at the camera.

I need to take better notes as to how many frames were used in stacking, etc.

2 Day Old Moon - Different Processing Approach

I believe this image has slightly more detail than the one I posted yesterday:

This image I did not stack any frames.  That right there reduced a substantial amount of blur.  Tried many times stacking images, but every one seemed to come out much blurrier than a single frame.  I did do some wavelet sharpening on each of the frames that I picked for each segment.  The wavelet enhancement was picked once, and held all of the settings constant for each segment.

After I was happy with each single stack segment, I pasted them together in imerge.
After that, I loaded the image in iris, and adjusted out the background lightness so it did not show the jagged edges of the frames in the final image.

Following that, the image was then loaded into photoshop, where I did a smart sharpen, then some contrast/brightness using the levels function, and what I ended up with is what you see here.

2 Day Old Moon

Finally, a decent photograph, and the elevation was low too.  I got home from eating dinner when I saw a nice thin sliver of moon, so I hurried and set up the 127mm refractor.  I used the new camera, a Logitech 270 webcam. I also used a #58 green filter.  I had bought this one to compare with the one I had been using.  This camera has far less vignetting than the other camera I have been using, so I think this will be a much better lunar cam.  The mosaic is rather low resolution, used 4 frames, each frame consists of at least 200 avi frames stacked in registax 6.  This image was done in a hurried fashion, but it looks like I got some good frames, so at a later post, I'll go over the frames and take better care of what avi frames get stacked.

Anyway here is a photo of a 2 day, 4 hour moon:

Considering this being the first lunar image (i believe) with the homemade refractor, I thought it came out pretty decent.  Again, I'll post a revised image later, when I have more time to spend on image processing.

Really Bad Conditions

Well, I was able to confirm that much of my problems with Saturn have been really bad conditions.  I bought another webcam today, a low cost unit at walmart.  Because of the fuzzy photos I was getting this past month, I was starting to think I had a problem with the camera.  I dont think that was the cause tonight, as the transparency was somewhat better this evening.  Although tonight's images werent that great, partially because for some reason, when I use the barlow, I seem to lose the image and sometimes I cant find it again, as was the case tonight.  Anyway, tonight's images didnt have that fuzz around the object, like there has been in previous images.  I believe the problem has been haze or thin cloud cover while trying to image.  Here is what I got this evening:

These images are all resized 2X in Registax 6, and you can see theyre quite small with varying degrees of focus.  It is a rather humid evening, with dew forming on the lens after about an hour of viewing.  I believe the images were taken before the dew had formed.  I used both cameras, and in all honesty, I could not tell a whole lot of difference in the images I had got from each camera.  This tells me that the camera I had been using is still functioning normally.  I would have been able to get better detail had I been able to use the barlow.

The gear-reduced clock appears to be working decent, and I still am not seeing as much motion blur as I have.

The new camera I'm going to try out on the moon the next time it is out.  It appears to have less vignetting than the cam I have been using.  The only real test though will be on the moon itself, so we'll see how it does.  The new cam does not have digital zoom, so I'm hoping it has a flatter field, because I will not be able to zoom in on the bright area if it varies much.

For grins, I thought I would put up a monochrome of a red channel image from the new camera.  This is resized 2X, and processed in Registax 5/

Saturn 4/2/11

I geared down the drive motor about 10:1.  The motion blur appears to be better, but I cannot seem to get a decent focus.  There appears to be a lot more noise than there used to be as well, and very lacking in detail.   Here is the best of what I got tonight: