Mars on the night of August 17/18
The night was mostly misty with a few scattered clouds.
Focus was very hard to attain because of the mist.
When I started to image the night was again misty but it cleared to being able
to see some detail. One day I will have to learn the seeing scale.
I was able to get a few AVI's of Mars around 3.15am (BST) this morning. Here
is an image I quite like. Taken with a ToUCam.
Telescope was my 222mm f/7.2 with a X4 Barlow (BC&F)
2 minute AVI. Gain 2%. Gama 0%, Saturation 100%. Auto colour.
5fps at 1/33 shutter speed.
Image captured in K3CCDTools and stacked in Registax 3. RGB aligned in
Registax and Wavlets 4,5 and 6 at 5, 10 and 19 respectively.
Telescope is the 222mm f/7.2 with the X4 Barlow.
This image of Mars is 400 frames from an AVI of 600. Captured at 5 fps for 120 seconds. Gain 2%. Gama 0%, Saturation 100%. Auto colour.
5fps at 1/33 shutter speed. The night was misty.
Here I captured the screen to show what settings I used to capture Mars using the Meade DSI colour.
Look at the screen capture above to see what setting I used.
The DSI is not like the webcam, The best I have been able to get out of the DSI is 1 frame per second. Here I captured 257 frames in .bmp format until I learn to use .fits format.
222mm f/7.2 @ f/28.8 (X4 barlow)
This image is made up of 400 frames. I captured a 90 second avi in K3CCDTools and processed in Registax.
Setting used here are: Gama 0. Saturation 100.
Auto colour. 5 fps. Gain 5%.
Telescope used was the 222mm f/7.2 @ f/28.8 (X4 barlow) with the ToUcam 740
This image is made up of 579 frames. I captured a 60 second avi in K3CCDTools and processed in Registax.
Setting used here are: Gama 0. Saturation 100.
Auto colour. 10 fps. Gain 15%. Looks a lot brighter but missing detail.
Telescope was the 222mm f/7.2 @ f/28.8 (X4 barlow) with the ToUcam 740
Telescope was my 222mm f/7.2 with X 4 Image Mate barlow.
Captured in K3CCDTools.
Setting were. Gain 13%, Gama 0%. Shutter 1/33.10fps.
90 seconds AVI. Lowest quality 70
Telescope was my 222mm f/7.2 with X 4 Power Mate barlow.
Captured in K3CCDTools.
Setting were. Gain 13%, Gama 0%. Shutter 1/33.10fps.
90 seconds AVI. Lowest quality 70
The left image is the Power Mate, right is the Image Mate.
These two images were taken just 10 mins apart and already you can see the details starting to get worse. The later I stayed out the worse it got. By 12.45 UT it was very misty and foggy and the clouds rolled in.
Setting used here are: Gama 0. Saturation 100.
Auto colour. 10 fps. Gain 5%. Time of 90 seconds.
Top 70% used for stacking in Registax 3.
This image was taken with the DSI with a X 4 Barlow lens.
Telescope was opperating at f/28.8.
Captured 300 images as .bmp's. Stacked best 211 images of these in Registax with slight tweak of Waveletts.
The weather was very misty/foggy and windy to boot.
Used the 222mm f/7.2 with a X4 Barlow.
Settings were: 10fps for 90 seconds.
White balance left untouched (centred)
Gamma 0
Saturation 100
Auto colour balance.
Shutter 1/33
Gain (around) 5%
Top 25% frames used.
Here is a screen capture of the settings used in K3CCDTools.
This image of Mars was taken using the Mintron secutiey camera using AstroVideo to capture the AVI's.
An AVI of 30 seconds each for RGB and IRB. The best 10 frames were used from each AVI. K3CCDTools Planetary Wizard was used to select the best 10 frames and stack them.
LRGB alignment was done in The Gimp.
Here are the setting I used for this run of capturing AVI's using K3CCDTools. Each test was for 90 seconds.
This is the best of this test. Captured at 5 fps and used the top 20% out of the 450 frames. Used Registax 3 for the stacking process. Used the 222mm f/7.2 Newtonian with a X 4 Barlow.
Here I used 10 fps = 900 frames. Again the top 20% was used in Registax to stack the images. Here there is a slight loss of detail I think.
Captured at 15 fps = 1,350 frames. As with the images above only the top 20% was used in the stacking process in Registax. A lot of the detail in the above images are now gone.
Not a very good night. Managed to get a few AVI's before the fog got to bad. Same setup as above. Used only the top 10% of 900 frames (90 secs at 10fps) this time as the night was not stable and Mars was bouncing round heavily.
Here again it was misty/high fog. I think its time to call it quits on the misty nights as it tends to throw the colours out, especially the blue channel. 90 Second AVI captured in K3CCDTools and processed in Registax. Top 30% used in the stack.