j2024-09-09_09-49.1_rrgb_mp

 Just a post of a QHY test on Jove...

Saturn and Titan

 

I tried a friends QHY200M camera out but didn't like the resolution and took advantage of decent skies.  Pretty happy with Titan.

Rest of the season here:

• Imgur - https://imgur.com/a/BtRPDvO 

• Google Photos - https://photos.app.goo.gl/hABBNtPAfVwgB45V8 

2x nights on Jupiter, the first night and better of the 2!

 Still some nagging collimation imperfections!

First Mars of the 2024-2025 season

 Due to a small typo in my original image, I had a wonderfully enlightening exchange with Roger Venable, whom said, "By the way, the blue-white streak over Mare Acidalium is a storm front that branched off the shrinking North Polar Hood. It is homologous to the jet streams that branch of the north polar region of Earth and create storms and tornados in North America in springtime."

2x nights on Jupiter, the avg one

 Decent seeing early but then it went back to average or below.

and the animation!

Rhea transit

 Just the shadow from what I can see!

Enjoy!

Saturn with 2 moons and a capture discovery

 

Here's a thoughtfully processed composite with moon's above the rings.

 

 

 

The animation is a bit difficult to see Tethys so I bumped up the brightness.

https://i.imgur.com/hiGVxGu.mp4

 

 

Having extra time to setup before your subject arrives is always dangerous. In this case Saturn was set for a showing after 1230 local time, because of trees. Having more time, I decided to do a proper star test with the new secondary holder and spider. In doing so I noticed similar issues to what I've seen in the past that manifested themselves as though I still had astigmatism. Being very disappointed, I decided to turn a few Firecapture settings on and off. Much to my surprise I noticed it actually impacted the results

 

I'm not really sure what made me want to try to turn auto-align off but you can see the results for yourself right here. It's quite striking. My theory, the camera I'm using has some sort of rolling shutter and it as the image is centered in software it creates artifacts that are very bad.

 

With auto-align on

 

 

 

After turning off auto-align

 

 

Same star, same scope, camera, settings only a few minutes apart.

 

 

Oddly I did a similar test on Saturn and didn't really see much difference.

 

 

With auto-align on

 

 

 

After turning off auto-align

 

 

My camera does have a rolling shutter - https://www.flir.com/products/blackfly-s-usb3?vertical=machine+vision&segment=iis

 

Just a word to the wise, the stellar collimation tests made a big difference in my opinion.

 

Thoughts?