Posts Made By: Paul Schroeder

This was the first sunny day we've had in a while here in Minnesota, so who can blame them! This was taken through a Borg 77ED at about 75 yards in my back yard.

It is not without some slight trepidation that I post the images below to this forum. When I see the quality of other items posted over the last several months (particularly of Jupiter) it’s apparent that the bar has been set quite high.

But, what the heck, I figure you need to start somewhere . I am now on my third week of attempting to image the planets, and I’m pleased to note that I’ve now progressed to the point (after three prior sessions) that at least now the objects I am imaging are identifiable. This is no small progress; my first images of Saturn were unidentifiable overexposed blobs.

To date I have been using my 1971 Questar 3.5 duplex for these images. From prior visual use I know it is superb optically, and I was curious to see how it would hold up under the demands of planetary imaging. My friend Dan K. images planets with his Questar, and he has provided invaluable counsel and encouragement as I’ve tried to figure things out.

My first attempts to image were with a ToUcam. It actually worked quite well, but the only computer I had available to use with it (a six year old HP laptop with 256meg of RAM) worked OK when capturing the images, but basically melted when I tried to process even the smallest files in Registax.

I had been planning for some time to buy a more current laptop and used this as the impetus to do so. As I discovered, new laptops pretty much only come with Vista, and I could not find a Vista driver for the ToUcam. To make a long story short I decided to get a different imaging camera, and I am now using a Luminera SKYnyx2 color camera with a current HP laptop (with 2 GB of RAM).

In any event, I’ve posted three images of Jupiter, at three different scales. I did pretty much all of the processing in Registax (each image is about 400 frames stacked) and it’s pretty apparent that I haven’t quite figured out how to do this best.

Comments and suggestions are most welcome!

As an aside I do most of my observing in Minnesota, but these Jupiter images were taken this past week while on vacation outside Fort Myers, Florida (I brought my Questar + accessories with me). On the 1 to 10 scale we might use to rate seeing in Minnesota I’d rate the seeing in Florida this week at about 37. I have never seen anything quite like this; at 5:30 in the morning (when I started taking these Jupiter images) the seeing was basically perfect.

The Questar is decidedly not an optimized imaging instrument, but hopefully you can see from these that it is capable of at least decent images.

Thanks and best regards,

Paul Schroeder

Hi all -

When I look at all of these terrific images I'm a bit intimidated, but here goes anyhow .

In April I posted three images I took with my Questar 3.5 from Florida. I had been only at planetary imaging for a month or so, but was blessed by the incredible Florida skies and the images weren't too bad.

I thought I'd give Jupiter another try this summer, even though at 46 degrees north (in northern Wisconsin, US) Jupiter is a bit too low for results to be very good.

In any event, seeing last night was quite good so I thought I'd give it a try. I'm sure with more time I could improve upon the processing, but these images roughly capture what I was able to see through the eyepiece.

For comparison, here below is the link to the images I took earlier this year (which at least to me were better).

http://www.astromart.com/forums/viewpost.asp?forum_post_id=519969&poll_id=&news_id=&page=

Comments welcome!

Paul Schroeder

Hi all -

I've been very impressed by the comet images that have been posted, so I though I would give it a try with my 1972 Questar 3.5 Duplex. My first effort two nights ago with my Lumenera camera was OK, but I thought it might work better if I could find a way to take a longer exposures.

Attached is my second attempt. This was taken with a Canon Digital Rebel through the axial port of the Questar, with one 2x barlow in the imaging train. This is one 30 second exposure (polar aligned and using the Questar Powerguide II drive), with a bit of post-processing in Photoshop. I think is about all I can get out of 3.5".

Comments and suggestions welcome!

Best regards,

Paul Schroeder

Hi all -

Attached is my first attempt to image the moon with my Tele Vue NP101. This was my second attempt at lunar imaging; the first attempt was with my Questar 3.5, so I'm moving up in aperture .

This was taken with a 5x Powermate and a Lumenera SKYlynx color imager, and is a stack of about 500 images. It was processed primarily in Registax, with a bit of touchup in Photoshop.

Comments and suggestions would be most welcome!

Best regards,

Paul

Last night I had my nice Celestron 9.25 SCT out to observe Saturn. I dutifully put it out in a shaded area more than two hours ahead of time, but once dusk approached the scope had a hard time keeping up with the falling temperatures (maybe 4 or 5 degrees per hour). Every 15 minutes or so while observing I'd do a quick star test, and sure enough the telltale heat plume was still apparent. I was out until about 11:30 and the scope never caught up with the temperature drop.

Once it has cooled the images are really quite good, but it is a perpetual nuisance to wait for it to get thermally stabilized.

I have become more convinced that the best scope for what I like to observe would be an eight to ten inch mak-cass (or SCT) that has been optimized for cooling down quickly. I know the hyper-scarce AP maks have a superb reputation for doing this; are there any other mak-casses or SCTs that come close to cooling as quickly?

The second alternative would be to do some kind of modification to the C9.25 to optimize it for cooling. Does anyone have any experience doing this, or know of any examples?

Thanks and best regards,

Paul

Hi all -

While the little Questar is not the ideal instrument for imaging detailed features on the moon, it does do an OK job on broader views. Attached is an image I took last night through the Questar -- this is a mosaic of a number of images, combined in Photoshop.

I had to compress it a bit to make it fit in this posting, as the original jpeg was about 1.3 meg. By way of comparison, the source TIFF file is about 230 meg.

As always comments and advice are welcome!

Best regards,

Paul Schroeder

Hi all -

We had an unseasonably warm and clear night here in MN right around full moon, so I thought I would see how well it would work to image it with my 1972 Questar 3.5. This image is the composite of 25 separate images, which were merged and adjusted in Photoshop. It took a while to get it to look OK, but I'm pleased with the result.

Any suggestions would be appreciated!

Best regards,

Paul Schroeder

Hi all -

The unseasonably warm weather continued here in Minnesota and I took advantage of it to try one more imaging session on the moon with my 1972 Questar 3.5. The seeing was OK but not great, but through the magic of stacking images I was able to come up with a reasonable composite.

This is a mosaic of six separate images (where each individual image is a stack of approximately the best 400 out of 1000), combined and processed a bit in Photoshop. On the edge of the moon there is a bit of a blur that I could (and probably will) mask out, once I find the time .

Suggestions and comments as always are most welcome!

Best regards,

Paul Schroeder

Hi all -

Attached you will find an image I took two nights ago of the moon through my 1972 Questar 3.5 duplex. This is a mosaic of 12 separate images, where each image was captured with a Lumenera SKYnyx 2 camera, and then processed in Registax and Photoshop.

The seeing was quite good (at least for here in MN) and as such I didn't have to process the image excessively. I've found the little Questar does a fairly reasonable job on images like this one.

Any suggestions would be most welcome!

Best regards,

Paul Schroeder