Weather struggles continue here south of Dallas. I have a break from the clouds yesterday morning and arose at 3:30 am to shoot some lunar followed by planetary imaging. Pretty much a wast of time as the seeing was poor being sandwiched between two major storm systems (the one last night delivered baseball-sized hail to my sons apartment complex west of Dallas.
These were captured with my ASI678MC and the Orion xx16g. I had pulled the optical train a couple of days earlier to set up the scope with the ASI585MC camera and imaged the Moon initially with that optical train still in place. I swapped the 678 back in after imaging the Moon and used Enif to adjust the collimation as best as I could given the conditions (Think Daryl's comment about sparking stars (I'm not sure that was his exact phrase so consider this paraphrasing). I am finding that the latest version of Firecapture that has added sharpening to the preprocess averaging feature has been helpful in focusing, especially on mornings like yesterday. I usually need more time than I had with dawn approaching to dial in the scope after swapping cameras. In any case here are the results for what they are.
Saturn stacked from a video derotation. 10% of 33,700 frames. Processed in Wavesharp and Image Analyzer. Final image size and canvas size applied in Paint Shop Pro. This image is presented at capture size from a 1.5x drizzled stack.
Here is Mars taken just before I packed it in. Fighting dew through all of these captures (Saturn and Mars). No horrible dew but enough to need to check before each capture and hit the secondary with a blast from the hair dryer on every other one(ish). Mare is just my reference frame. The center 15,000 frames were stacked. This is 11% of those 15,000 frames. No video derotation was performed as the data wasn't worth the effort. This image was resized 150% in paint shop and placed in the 400 x 300 px canvas used during capture. Not because the data justifies the resize but simply to make the planet visible in the post.
