Another Moon and some lunar surface mosaicing

I managed to get out again on Thursday night. First off to grab another shot of the moon with the 450d on the Skymax, tripod mounted



I also pulled up the colour a little



I then setup the Skymax on the HEQ5 and tested out what I thought would make a good planetary/lunar camera, the aGent V4. It's a very nice webcam, and supports high frame rates etc, but the lack of a gain control in software makes it unusable for Astro. So I used the SPC900 to capture some close in shots. I had a bash with the Ultima barlow to start with, but I'm having real problems stacking the image. This is the best I've come up with, but there's something not right with it. I suspect it's down to tracking issues at the high magnification involved.



I popped the SLR back on with a 2x TC and had a bash at a small three pane mosaic, firing off 20 frames for each pane, then stacking in Registax and mosaicing in imerge.




I then thought, as I hadn't done one yet, I'd have a go at a terminator mosaic. So 9 AVI's of about 1200 frames, registax processed about 1000 of each, and mosaiced in imerge



As I was in the groove and capturing well, I had a bash at a full mosaic. I hadn't thought anything about doing this, so it was a bit of a suck it and see approach to capturing each pane. This is 18 panes details as for the terminator mosaic



As you can see, I appear to have missed a few bits. I need to work out a more methodical approach to capturing the data. I will have another go at this.

I then had a bash at Saturn using a 5x barlow and seperatly the 2x barlow, but the AVI's won't stack and to behonest they were a bit (well a lot) rubbish. I think, partly, this was down to dewing up of the corrector so I will be making a dew shield out of some camping mat.

The HEQ5 works really well for this, the Skymax is such a small little scope, it looks a bit like a toy, but it works very well. Oddly, I find the focuser on the Skymax easier to use than the focuser on the C80ED. A fun session.