finally – after another endless dryspell (clouds, rain, rain, rain, snow, sickness…) – clear skies and decent seeing. The night of January 15th provided fair conditions for my best Jupiter images to date. I could capture the Io transit right beneath the GRS and the start of Io’s shadow transit. After 13 G/R/B/IR sequences I stopped the session since seeing turned too bad to continue. 2 sequences are fully processed, a lot more are waiting to be finished for an animation of Io’s transit. Here one RGB version, click the image for all captures of the session:

Cheers, Oliver

here two results from my Jupiter session on November 21st. My best Jupiter up to date despite the not optimal seeing conditions, still plenty of room for improvement

Cheers, Oliver

hey, I made it to image Jupiter again after six years
I used my new Basler Ace 640-100GM for the first time and am quite satisfied with the Sony ICX618ALA equipped dwarf camera. Seeing has been significantly below average, transparency very bad due to haze and fog illuminated by the near moon. Nevertheless I could use the Ace at 9.8ms exposure time for red and green channels with the C11 at f20 – quite impressive.

RRGB version, click image for full version with channels

I was unsure which capture software to use with the Ace. the second one tried in the field that night has been Torsten Edelmann’s Firecapture and it worked like a charm on my U7300 powered W7 64Bit subnotebook operating at 1.3GHz only. I replaced the hard-drive with a Hitachi 7200upm version and could capture 102FPS without any issues at full frame size of 659×494 pixels, great to image the quickly rotating Jupiter. I’ll use a tad less gain for future imaging runs. So far the Ace has not produced any artefacts running at high frame rates, excellent!

Stay tuned for more captures, I hope to have some decent seeing to bring the imaging rig closer to it’s limits.

Cheers, Oliver

Cheers, Oliver

another one from September 25th: The dissolving AR11301 in white-light:

Click image for larger version

Cheers, Oliver

I finally managed to image again after a very long dryspell – slowly recovering my imaging skills. I really enjoyed collecting photons of our star although setting up the gear after more than a year was quite challenging: What’s the password of my imaging laptop? Where’s the cabling for the power supply? Can I get into focus with the micro-focuser that I never used before? I have been rewarded with a quite active solar surface. Great to see that the boring years are over for a while.
Processing the results has been another challenge: Registax6 and AVIStack2 showed up in the meantime since I processed something for the last time. I’m still toying around and evaluate the new versions looking for my personal best solution, here some first results processed with Registax6:

AR11302 shows some impressive spots:
 
Click image for a larger view

AR11298 just rotatating out of view, my first try in CaK with the Baader K-Line filter:
 
Click image for a larger view

Here the imaging rig. My significant other called it ‘equipment overkill’. I strongly disagree

Some more images to follow…

Cheers, oliver

here’s another lunar image from April 23rd: Pitatus – one out of the ‘problematic’ footage. After fiddling with AS and Registax without much success I finally placed a number of alignment points in Registax5.1 manually, processed the AVI twice with different alignment regions and combined the best areas of both runs in PS. This footage seems to fool the automatic AP evaluation in AS and Registax.

Click image for full version with details

The results is not too shabby, resolution is on par with my Pitatus captured 2008 with the C9.

Pitatus is a fascinating crater with it’s lava flooded floor featuring many rills, cracks and craterlets that are a good indicator for the resolution achieved. At least as fascinating is Hesiodus A, the CC (concentric crater) at the bottom left of the image. The reason for the concentric ring formation of CCs is unknown today, it’s safe to assume they are not formed by any kind of double impact.

Cheers, Oliver

after my lunar imaging session on April 23rd I almost called it a day (night?) since the seeing worsened substantially at lady lunar. I was about to break down the equipment but decided to take a final look at Satun. To my surprise the view was quite stable and well defined in the eyepiece although Saturn was located above my roof top and less than 40 degrees afar from the moon. Sometimes I really don’t get the mysteries of seeing
I fired up the already stowed away camera again and shot 4 AVIs: RGBR. Transparency was really bad that night so that I could only use 1/19s integration time for R and G and 1/11s for B. Capturing ~4000 frames at 7.5fps for the blue channel took forever.
The AVIs have been processed in AutoStakkert and sharpened in Fitswork with the iterative Gauss sharpening. This gives the best results for my Saturn captures and enhances noise virtually not at all. Wavelets produce a lot of noise used on my Saturn captures and enhance cloud banding much less – quite in contrast to my lunar captures where wavelets work best by far.
The RGB image is the result of the G,B,R imaging sequence. The result shows the Rhea-transit shadow and Titan. I aligned Titan on the R and B channel to it’s position in G and enhanced brightness/contrast partially. The cloud bands show some small details, most prominently above/below the rings and I’m not 100% confident these are real features. I created an contrast enhanced animation of both red captures but two frames aren’t enough to really tell all the features are real.
After the last R capture seeing also diminished at Saturn, time to end the session…

Click image for full version with details

Cheers, Oliver

reasonable results of my Plato and Pitatus captures from April 23rd are still pending. I tried Registax 5.1 with the Plato AVI yesterday without success. A first run with a single alignment point to check out the AVI’s potential lead to a good but not spectacular result near the alignment point, a sharp crater rim and craterlets close to the AP well defined. Multipoint processing was not that good. The automatic MAP selection resulted in a horrible image with alignment areas washed out and harsh seams between the areas, carefully choosing 12 points manually wasn’t much better
Ok, I switched back to AVIStack. The first AS processing I tried was fine outside the crater where the harsh terrain has good contrast for the AP tracking. Only the crater floor was completely washed out. I parametrized AS as suggested by Michael Theusner himself and others with increased correlation area radius and higher smoothing factor settings. The estimated  processing time of 8 hours compared to a fraction of that before required running the job overnight. Unfortunately Windows 7 decided to reboot after updates during the night although it shouldn’t, needless to say all processings are lost Jeez, who’s programming this stuff…
I’ll retry today, if AS still has issues on the contrastless crater floor I might switch back to manual MAP processing with several single point runs and insert the crater floor into the otherwise fine AS result. It looks like these captures with high frequency seeing oscillations and prominent noise are a very hard nut to crack. A bit surprising to me since I always have been amazed how good AS is tracking alignment points on almost no contrast in the footage.

Cheers, Oliver

finally some lunar imaging again. The night of April 23rd started with decent seeing at dusk with high frequency oscillation that made focussing tricky but an overall quite stable image. Unfortunately it worsened substantially during my imaging session but I managed to grab some AVIs. Seeing peaked during my Copernicus (again ) capture, here the result:

Click image for full version with details

880 frames have been stacked in AVIStack, wavelet sharpening in Registax and postprocessing in PS. Although the moon was “only” 45° high in the skies this is my best Copernicus image so far. I wasn’t too sure about the optical quality of my C11 but the last weeks showed it’s potential – give me some very good seeing to bring it to the limits
I also imaged Plato and Pitatus during this session but the processing of those AVIs is very tricky. The high frequency of the oscillation combined with the prominent noise due to high gain settings in low contrast regions is fooling the alignment point tracking of all programs I tried so far. The lava floors of both craters are completely washed out in the results obtained so far. I tried Registax 5.1 today without success, currently AVIStack is crunching on the data with some alternative settings…

Cheers, Oliver