Experimental testing

I carried out one little experiment last night. I used an Antares 5x barlow with the webcam on my little f5 80mm Achro. Consider the seeing was really rather rubbish, and I seriously overpowered my scope, up to over 300x mag (Max is 160x). I hadn't originally intended stacking this, but figured why not. I used a single alignment point in Registax, and just sort of took the defaults until wavelets which I just moved sliders around until it started to look good. To get anything at all on screen, I'd had to shove the gain of the webcam up to pretty much maximum, as the x5 barlow robs a lot of light. Still, after a quick despeckle in PS, this is the result.



I'm really rather pleased with that, and I'm looking forward to a clear night with better seeing to be able to give this a proper work out. Of course the current R&P focuser is a total pain at this sort of level, because it just doesn't provide enough fine control, and with the play in it, shifts the image all over the place. I had to use the motors on the mount in the end to get the craters back in the frame after I'd stumbled on focus.