This is a shot I took of Saturn last night. I had my larger scope out in the Anza area and, while I hoped to use the CCD cam, my remote set-up problems set me toward a quick shot of Saturn before turning to visual observing.

This is 2,400 of 8,000 exposures with a DMK color USB cam through a C-11 and a 4x Powermate. Seeing was 6/10.

The visual observing was fun too, Great views of M 51, M 101, and NGC 2403. But I was also reminded why I like my permanent set-up, even if it is in the city. I am still sore from moving the mount.

--Andy

Attached Images

Saturn-f40-080404-02v02.jpg (46.6 KB, 63 views)

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Observatorio de la Ballona

Great image Andy, There may not be many more opportnities for good open ring shots for a while.

Kind regards
Matt

Andy

That shot is just beautiful
Keep em coming

A fine shot it is Andy, The disk is shrinking and the ring will change its angle to a plane level. Its becoming a difficult object to photograph i tried two days ago a no-go for me bad weather didn't help either. You did great and Clear Skies.

Thanks Efrain, Starchild, and Matt.

One interesting thing in processing this image. The best result I got was at the base image size and pixel depth. On other images I've done better both up-sampling and increasing the pixed depth. Time for some more experimentation.

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Observatorio de la Ballona

Huge image scale, Andy! It looks a bit squished in the vertical direction? But it could just be my screen.

I think i've given up on Saturn this apparition, so it's always nice to see more images of it.

Well done.

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Mike
. mikesalway.com.au - Astronomy and Photography by Mike Salway
. IceInSpace - The Australian Amateur Astronomy Community
. My Bio | My Jupiter 2007 Gallery | My Image Gallery

Thanks for the kudos.

And thanks for the sharp eye. I've been using the DMK camera and have had a fair amount of frustration with selecting the proper settings to get the full 60fps frame rate and a file that could be opened by Registax. I use VirtualDub for sequences longer than the apparent 2,000 frame limit in Registax, and for the codecs that Registax can't read, but it would be nice to be able to do the Lunar shots without the VirtualDub step.

I've been using the default codec which is the DV Video Encoder. It apparently saves the file as 720x480 (I noticed the 720 vs. 480, and put looking at the camera specs until later, but it is clearly 640x480). This is the source of the problem.

Any suggestions on Codecs? I'm going to experiment mode. And I guess I can resample the images to fix the improperly captured data. I take a peek at IceInSpace too.

Thanks,

--Andy

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Observatorio de la Ballona

Andy, use Y800 always. It'll fix the squishing problem.

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Mike
. mikesalway.com.au - Astronomy and Photography by Mike Salway
. IceInSpace - The Australian Amateur Astronomy Community
. My Bio | My Jupiter 2007 Gallery | My Image Gallery

I've been doing some experimentation and have come across several issues.

Y800 is fine if I go directly into Registax and set the options to debayer (GB). It also comes out in a nice grainy black and white in VirtualDub if I don't tell it to call the format Y800 in IC Capture. I could Debayer (see this thread on CloudyNights) with ninox (PPMCentre?) but I don't want that extra step.

BY8 works ok on capture up to 60fps, but the output has to be in the format RGB24 which occupies 3x the space as it should since it's using 24bits for each pixel which only has 8bits of data. 100 frames is 90mb vs 30mb for plain Y800.

YUY2 (with no compression, unspecified format) gives me 30fps, 60mb file, and opens in both Registax and VirtualDub.

Saturn's been too dark at f30 or f40 to get to 30fps sometimes, much less 60fps. But the Moon can easily be done at 60fps.

I suppose using any compression codec will cause data loss. Is that so?

Thanks,

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Observatorio de la Ballona

The aspect ratio is fixed on the attached file....

Attached Images

Saturn-f40-080404-02v02-crop.jpg (35.3 KB, 7 views)

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Observatorio de la Ballona

very nice image by you, I heard that for several years the saturn rings can be observe in this position.(somewhere I read)

Thanks Suntrack!

Actually, the ring angle has been narrowing. Efrain Rivera posted a great shot showing the movement of the rings over the years. By September 2009, they will be flat relative to us and very hard to see.

[rant] Now, one final comment on my format / frame rate rant above. I only need 60fps for bright objects like the Moon and Jupiter in less than optimal seeing. So I can live with 30fps and get a smaller file for all other objects. And for Jupiter I won't be combining more than 90 seconds or so of data due to rotation, keeping total frame count below the 2,000 limit in Registax. [/rant]

Update:
I've captured my research in a more complete form on my blog. Comments and corrections would be greatly desired.

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Observatorio de la Ballona