Hi guys.

Here are my latest shots of Jupiter and Saturn, taken last week.

They were taken with a 10" dob (no tracking), and a ToUcam at f/10 (focal length 2500mm (2x barlow)). Because there's no tracking, I take many short avi's (5-10 seconds each) as the object drifts through the FOV. I then stitch these together and run them through registax to align and stack them, and do the wavelet post-processing.

Saturn:



Jupiter (The bigger one is resampled at 1.5x in registax):



More details and other images can be found on the Images page on my website.

Thanks for looking. Comments or suggestions welcome.

__________________
Mike
. 10" GSO Dob
. 11x70 Binos
. IceInSpace - Aussie/NZ astro website and community forums
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/logo.jpg

Great... I've just got a digital camera and I'm looking forward to giving that a go!

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Astronomy for Beginners.com
Gavin Vincent Web Design

Great pictures, I'm just starting to get my own set-up put together and hope to post some of my own soon. It's too bad I didn't have a set-up a couple of years back when saturns entire ring was visible. That image exist only in my mind now, unless someone elsr happened to get a good shot at it!

Great pictures. I have a 10" dob and have been thinking that I needed to invest big $$ to get an equatorial mount and take some pictures. Thanks for the post. Now I know that I have other options. Does the camera get it's power through the cable or does it have it's own power supply? Are you able to find your target and focus with the webcam in place or is the image on your monitor bright enough to allow you to do this with the camera in place?

Sorry, I guess I should have read my question before I posted. What I meant to ask is if you can leave the camera in place or do you need to find your target and focus, and then attach the camera?

Hi Rob.
There are a couple of ways to take images with a dob..

1. Afocal

Using your digital camera, either handhold, put on a tripod, or using a camera adapter that attaches to your eyepiece, point the camera into the eyepiece and click away. The best method is to get a camera adapter from scopetronix or the steadypix adapter from Orion. It attaches to your eyepiece and holds the camera pointing into the eyepiece, so you move your dob about as normal until you like what you see in the camera's LCD screen, and click away. Focus as normal with your focus knobs. I don't have this adapter, wish I did
Using a tripod is how I started out with my digicam. Put the camera on a tripod and adjust height etc until it's pointing into the eyepiece. Can be frustrating, as every time the object drifts out of LCD screen, you need to move the tripod, adjust the dob, and put the tripod back again.
Handholding can be done too, but images can turn out blurry or out of focus due to shaking and moving as you're clicking away.

You will be limited to the planets and moon with this setup, because you will only be able to do short exposures since you're not tracking the object.

I started out using afocal, and the images I took with this method are on my images page, you'll just have to read the details to find out which ones.. it's safe to say anything older than Dec 10-ish last year would be afocal.


2. Webcam

Using a laptop, and a webcam (with the lens removed and a 1.25" adapter attached), put the webcam into the focus barrel and when you find the object, take video as it drifts across the FOV, and stop the video before it disappears off the other side. Re-align, and repeat.
I start with the eyepiece in just to get my finderscope aligned, once my finder is aligned I put the ToUcam in and generally won't use the eyepiece again. I use a barlow in front of the ToUcam which doubles the image scale, but it also halves the amount of time you've got to capture the image. You literally get 10 seconds or less of video each pass, and it can take 30 seconds to realign it again so that the object drifts through the FOV.

For focussing, you do it with the ToUcam in, but make yourself a hartman mask. Find a nearby star and get it in the FOV, and then you have 5-10 seconds to adjust focus before it drifts out of the view. With the hartman mask you're trying to get the 3 circles to combine into 1 sharp circle, but every time you move the focus knob the image jumps and shakes about making it very difficult, and then it has gone off the screen!!!

I've just bought a moonlite CR2 focuser to make fine focusing easier and sharper and hopefully not shake the image about when I do it.

It's a very frustrating way to get into imaging, but it still has it rewards.. there's a challenge in pushing your equipment to its limits.

Read this thread on the IceInSpace forums, which details some of the agony and ecstacy you'll enounter, should you embark upon this journey

It does get better and easier though, it doesn't take me as long these days and i'm getting much better at the capture and processing techniques, and my results are improving as a result.

If you have any more questions, just contact me or post here or on the IceInSpace forums.

Good luck!

__________________
Mike
. 10" GSO Dob
. 11x70 Binos
. IceInSpace - Aussie/NZ astro website and community forums
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/logo.jpg

[quote] which details some of the agony and ecstacy you'll enounter, should you embark upon this journey [quote]

So true.....I'm still in the agony part, lol.

Here's my latest attempts at Jupiter yesterday morning 19/01/2005..

The seeing was excellent! Hardly any swimming around.

And I finally captured the GRS!

The different images are the resultant stacks from captures at 15fps, 10fps and 5fps, some with slightly different processing in registax.

Thanks

__________________
Mike
. 10" GSO Dob
. 11x70 Binos
. IceInSpace - Aussie/NZ astro website and community forums
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/logo.jpg

Great work Mike, you are mastering the difficult art of Dob astrophotography

Iceman I like what your doing. I am now just starting to get into wide field astrophotography. show us more. yours in the way PaulF. Campbell