Noob Alert: Shots of the moon with my first telescope

[turfpit]

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

[Force10]

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!

[turfpit]

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.

Planetary-Capture.JPG (41.54 KiB) Viewed 2463 times

Phases of Venus might be another one to go after.

Venus-phases.JPG (21.02 KiB) Viewed 2463 times

Dave