DF9CY Christoph Petermann - Astrophotography

Weather looked promising and I have set up my telescope rig for imaging Jupiter again and later the moon.

At the end I was very disappointed, because there were no sharp images at all. I have not found the reason yet for this dilemma. I have checked collimation of the INTES MK67 before attaching the camera and it looked rather good. Seeing was not the best at the beginning but it became better after some time.

Nevertheless the images are VERY unsharp compared to what I have produced earlier. I have made a number of AVI films. The ones without any filter are completely useless. I made my first LRGB (Luminance-Red-Green-Blue) and (R-RGB = Red for luminance) image with the monochromatic camera. Also I took a series of AVIs with my old venerable ToUcam.

At the end of the session I turned the camera towards the moon and made a few lunar shots. Those with the barlow lens inserted are poor again, so here is a mosaic of three images taken from the north-eastern limb.

Jupiter LRGB image. ca 35% of 1000 images each color. 12 November 2011 - 1930UT

The same image with Red channel for luminance = Jupiter R-RGB image. ca 35% of 1000 images each color. 12 November 2011 - 1930UT

Jupiter Colour image with the ToUcam. ca 45% of 1000 images. 12 November 2011 - 1954UT

A Moon panorama (My first with the DMK camera) / ca 35% of 1000 images each image.

Same image as above, but some craters named.

Equipment

Optics           : StellarVue Nighthawk Achromat Refractor d=80mm f=480mm (f=1/6)
                 : Intes MK-67 Maksutov Type Reflector d=150mm f=1800mm (f=1/12)
Camera           : NIKON D7000 DSLR unmodified
                 : The Imaging Source DMK21AU4.AS monochrome USB highspeed camera
                 : Philips ToUcam 740 Color WebCam
Filter           : IR/UV Cut, Astronomik H-Alpha, Astronomik LRGB
add. optics      : ED 2x Barlow lens
                 : 35mm, 50mm, 135mm and 200mm NIKON lenses available
Mount            : VIXEN GP with MT1 / Littlefoot Controller
Guiding          : PHD
Aquisition       : Robust Sony VAYO Pentium4 Notebook (Windows XP) or DELL D820 DualCore (Windows 7)
Image Processing : ImagesPlus, NeatImage 7, PaintShopPro XI, PhotoShop LE 9, Registax 6, AviStack 2.0