Posts Made By: Gianluca Valentini

Very beautiful picture. Great details. Which camera did you use?

Thanks
Luca

Incredibly deep shot of the Rosette. Probably the deepest I've seen so far. The exposure time is enornous, but I guess that accounts for the depth of the image!

Is this the full image or is it cropped?

Ciao and thanks for posting.
Luca

Great picture Joe!

Thanks for posting it.

Luca

Hello Tom,

I had the same problem when I was using Vrecord (which, by the way, sucks big time!). I then moved on to QCfocus, which is what I presently use and I never had the same problem until the last imaging night a few days ago: in some of my 10fps avis I was loosing more than 10% of the frames which was a totally new experience for me. Although my laptop is a little more powerful than yours (pentium 4 Centrino 1.5 Mhz with 512 Mb RAM), I took the precaution to avoid jamming the USB port and did not use the USB mouse (touchpad was good enough), but the problem persisted. The puzzling thing is that the dropped frame ratio changed dramatically from one avi to another: some of the 2 min. 10fps films had no dropped frames whatsoever and I could not point out what changed between one instance and the next.

So I can't give you much help, but two things you can try out and see what happens: (a) be sure that you have only the webcam plugged in your USB port (which is one of the tips provided directly by Philips to have the best working conditions for the Toucam pro) and (b) most importantly change acquisition software: K3ccdtools I heard is very good, but I don't know it at all. Qcfocus I know well and I strongly advice, being very easy to use and serving the purpose just right. You can then move to Registax for processing (K3ccdtools has its own processing area, so it is a complete package for acquisition and processing. Your choice). I believe it would help also to stop all the unnecessary programs that may be running on your pc to free the CPU from useless jobs.

Sorry about the long reply. Hope this helps a little. I'm sure someone with more experience than me will come up with a better answer soon. If not try this and let us know.

Ciao and merry Xmas to you.
Luca

Hello Mark, it is amazing but I was thinking the same thing the other day while I was watching your fabulous Ha shot of the rosette neb! I wasn't exactly thinking of Rocky, but a victorious fighter. However, I then had a much darker thought: it may also look like the head of a demon, but the resemblance is way less evident than the "fighter" one.
However it is a nice zoom into the huge object.

Ciao
Luca

Now that is a contribution I greatly missed! Thanks for sharing your outstanding work Wesley. Needless to say, happy holidays.

Ciao
Luca

A superb picture Johannes. Thanks for posting it. Merry Christmas and holidays.

Ciao
Luca

For what it may count, that is definitely the Encke, Wes and congratulations to you for capturing it. It may show only in the little portion you cropped, but it is there and it is in the right spot.
I actually saw it in your first post and wanted to add it to my reply, but being a novice I thought I better keep my mouth shut. But it was really there and that is a plus for me!;-)

Ciao and keep on stunning us with your amazing images Wes.

Luca

Very nice natural look Frank. I hope you don't mind but I took the liberty of tweaking the color balance a little (your image seems to be a little on the red side) decreasing the red. I also noticed that increasing the blue channel a bit revealed a hint of the 3rd ring, but I'll leave that to your pleasure.

However very nice, smooth image: congratulations.

Luca

Hello James and Steve and thanks for your interest and advice. I'm sorry if it were unclear in the original post, but this is an alt-az driven picture taken from my backyard in the middle of the city at F15 (F10 of my nexstar 11 GPS and the 1.5 focal multiplier built in the Fuji finepix S2 pro at prime focus). Unfiltered and unprocessed (not even dark frame)
That is the reason why I had to keep my exposures so short and even that short was not enough for an unforgiving F15! In some of the images I was able to test shorter exposure batches (6sec @800 ISO and 4sec @1600 ISO) and the drift effect there is less evident although still present. Next time .63 focal reducer that will bring me still close to F10, but better than F15!
As far as collimation is concerned, you may be right although I check it everytime I start observing or imaging. I have a hard time performing the operation with my scope (mostly due to size). I'm expecting a collimating "help" that's coming in the mail. I do not trust my ability to determine visually if collimation is as good as it could be (the large donut is too misleading and the slightly out of focus star is extremely dependent on the quality of the seeing). If it is not collimated it is only a little bit that I could not judge visually.

Thanks again for the comments.

Luca