Recorded 2012 - 03 - 21
The weather was fine all throughout the night. I had my Skywatcher 10" Flextube with me. The details were very sharp, sharper than ever before.
I could see surface details on Mars.
M13 was nice and large with my Pentax 12.5mm. With averted vision i could sense hundreds of stars within the cluster and in my head i got a feeling of the overall structure.
Also viewed M57 with its eggshape and hole in the middle.
Found M27 and had my first visual of it. It looked a bit like a square shape.
At Saturn i could see the Cassini division, the planet casting its shadows on the rings. Could also see the rings in front of the planet casting a shadow on to the planet.
Could also see the dark belt on the planet. The entire planet had this soft beige colour tone to it.
Decided to try to capture it with my DSLR on this fine night.
Instead of recording a liveview feed with its lower resolution i went for a 1920 x 1080 @ 20 fps video instead. I wanted as much resolution as possible, at the cost of video compression.
Used Quicktime Player to export the video out as an image sequence. Used VirtualDub to assemble an Avi from those images. Aligned and cropped with Castrator then 25% stacked with AutoStakkert2.
Canon 500D + 2.5x Powermate.
Canon 500D + 5x Powermate.
Here's a 100 frames animated GIF from the Castrator AVI to show just how noise it was. I'm quite amazed by stacking programs in their way to produce images out of such data.
Link 605kb GIF animation.
Canon EOS 500D + 5x powermate.
Recorded 2012 - 04 - 15
Recorded with TS 102mm Individual f/11 Achromat + DMK31 mono.
UV/IR Cut filter and 2.5x powermate - 800 out of 4000 frames stacked @ 30 fps.
UV/IR Cut filter and 2.5x powermate - 400 out of 2000 frames stacked @ 15 fps.
Canon 500D + 2.5x powermate.
Canon 500D + 5x powermate.
RGB Images:
