More Mooning around and a first Saturn of the year

Sunday was a real mixed bag of weather. Sunny, cloudy, rainy. There was a brief clear spell in the early evening, and once again, I popped the Skymax on my camera tripod, the 450d at prime and grabbed a shot of the moon against the blue sky.



The clear gap didn't last and within the hour it was raining again.

Anyway, as I was getting ready for bed, checking doors etc, I saw the sky had cleared so I grabbed the Skymax on the NexStar and dashed out for a short session. I used the webcam to capture a few sequences. Having messed up the alignment... The moonwash across the sky confused me, and I aligned on totally the wrong thing, the tracking was not as good as it can be, so the AVI's were quite short.

First up Aristarchus 231 of 256 frames


I pulled out a bit of colour too


Then I moved onto Gassendi 481 of 703 frames


I decided I'd have a pop at Saturn, this is all 274 frames


I'm not sure what caused the diagonal lines, the only thing I can think of, was I had the gain on the webcam up quite high. I've got some work to do on this, my laptop screen is always very dim when running on battery and that's making my job much harder to get the settings and focus right.

Anyway, thanks to CW on SGL, I've found a way to remove the lines, run a small Gaussian blur on it..


I also finally managed to get my frames from the 450d stacked into a 3 pane terminator mosaic. This was shot using the 2xTC on the 450d at prime on the Skymax. I had to convert the RAW frames to jpg before Registax 5 would play ball with them, it's still in Beta release though, so hopefully this will work better once fully released.


I really like the Skymax, it's working great for me.