A Planetary Summer

    Hello everyone.  I can't believe summer is over already.  I spent alot of the summer struggling with tracking issues with my Losmandy G11 mount.  Deep-sky imaging was a struggle therefor I didn't capture anything usable.  I finally after much research on line  I speculated it could be a bad bearing.  So I recruited My cousin (who rebuilds classic cars) to order the best quality bearings he could find.  A total of 7.  Long story short,  What a difference it made.  Now I'm ready for the Fall and Winter imaging season.  Anyway, since deep-sky imaging was out of the question, I turned my telescope and camera on the planets.  I started  with Jupiter, then Saturn, than finished with Mars.  With Mars being  closer than it has been since 2003 I was hoping for great results.  Well, as in 2003, Mars decides to kick up a planet wide dust storm.  My first few attempts just looked like an orange ball.  I did manage to get a few fair images a few weeks past opposition.  

All the planetary images I captured , there done using the same method, and the same equipment.

Tele Vue NP101 4" f5.4 APO Refractor.      

Tele Vue 3X Barlow

Celestron NexImage 5 camera

Celestron iCap 2.4 for camera controll

RegiStax 6.1, and Photoshop CC for image processing

I captured AVI's of 6000 frames.  using the highest shutter speed as possible and frame rate of 50 fps.  Also keeping the gain low to eliminate noise.

 

 

  Some of my Jupiter images.  I am quite happy with them.  On average I was able to get a shutter speed of 1/70th of a second with a gain of 45 @ 50 fps.  The camera resolution was @ 640x480

 This was the best image of Saturn I could get.  Using only a 4" telescope, limits the light I can gather.  On average the shutter speed was 1/15th sec. and the gain was 60.  I need a larger scope to get better results.  This is still my best Saturn image.

I was hoping for better images of Mars, but the dust storms did have an effect.  I was able to get a shutter speed of 1/120th sec. with the gain down to 20. 

Overall I think it was a successful summer season.  I managed to get some reasonable planetary pictures.  My mount is finally been repaired and ready for Deep Sky imaging, and after 7 years I have a new, speedy PC with a 500Gb SSD with a high end video card for running Photoshop CC.  It took allot of research to conclude what it takes to get the best performance out of Photoshop, but it was worth it.  This will make my image processing way faster and more enjoyable.  If your interested in finding more info on what computer I purchased, just leave me a comment.

Till Next Time:  Glen
Thanks