SharpCap Forums

Use of the reticule will help your alignment accuracy.

The 183C camera produces FITS files of 40Mb which does use a lot of disk space. Not too bad when longer exposures are being used for deep sky. For lunar work, the camera will deliver 35fps if I capture at 1920x1200. Full resolution returns 7fps.

I always seem to capture at least 100Gb in a 1 hour lunar session.

A UV/IR cut filter or Wratten #25 (red) filter are useful cheap additions which help mitigate brightness and atmospheric turbulence respectively. You could experiment with a Barlow. That will require increased exposures which reduce the fps. Mosaics are another item to add to the lunar list.

Good luck with Mars.

Dave

Well...it looks like the focal length of my scope matched with this camera will limit my captures to just the moon. I shot mars last night...here's how it sit's in the un-cropped canvas at the 3264x2448 max resoltution:



It's possible I'm new and doing something wrong...but I don't think so. I'm really ok with the limits of this set up for now...I never gave astrophotography a thought until I got a 4" telescope for my b-day at the end of February...lol. It's been fun getting shots of the moon and think I can get even better shots then I did before now that I've learned more.

The good news is I got my tracking dialed pretty well with Dave's help! I was impressed with myself that I was able to get mars right in the middle and very stable at one point...lol. I slewed over to venus...got it tracking well, then slewed back to mars and got it tracking good again. That's a win for me.

That all seems pointless now since those objects are out of reach for me...but it will help me get a nice stable track on the moon to get some better shots than my first time.

One thing I noticed about the focal length of this scope with this camera...I've read others that bought this camera had to use a focal reducer to achieve focus. With this set up...I can achieve focus on the moon without a reducer, while using the Barlow as a reducer, using the Barlow with the lens in, and removing the Barlow lens and screwing it directly on to the camera. It might be fun to run some tests on the 4 options there on the same area of the moon and see how they compare.

Thanks again for the help and advice Dave...cheers!

Glad to hear the alignment technique worked for you. Try reducing the capture area to 640x480 (or even 320x240). Make sure to use 8-bit capture and SER format. Step the capture area down from maximum gradually in case the image moves off to one side or out of view.



Phases of Venus might be another one to go after.




Dave