4 replies to this topic

[sfugardi]

Poor seeing, but the best of the week for the late afternoon window. After picking up Venus visually around 4pm, I had a tough time locating it in the eyepiece as my Rigel finder seemed very dim. I couldn't tell if the battery is going or if daytime use is not good, so I held up my black glove to be able to see the target just above Venus. Once I found it with the 24mm Pan, I dropped in the 2.5x Powermate, re-centered, then dropped in the ADC, tuning it by "eye' which it not ideal as I should have fine tuned it with a color camera but I was afraid of losing it on the laptop screen with a camera switch. Using my 290MM and U-Bessel filter, I captured 12min of 100fps data at approximately f13. Stacking the best 8000 frames (10%) yielded a decent crescent with a hint of cloud bands. The diameter of Venus is quite large and impressive at 165x. Hope you like it!

 

Regards,

Steve

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[sfugardi]

Here's my redo using the best 6000 frames minus a few clipped ones. A little less harsh processing and no linear contrast in curves since that really darkened the terminator region in my previous post. Hope you like it!

 

Regards,

Steve

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[Opticsjunkie]

Very nice and smooth image of Venus, Steve! 'Less is more', the gradients and cloud detail are top.

 

-Jeroen

[sfugardi]

Jeroen, Thank you! I think the key with Venus is to just collect a ton of frames and stack the best <10%. For this last one, I went with 7%.

 

Regards,

Steve

 

PS: Thanks for the likes!

[sfugardi]

Guys, 1 last thing on Venus. Without a goto mount, finding Venus in the daytime can be difficult. By using the free "SkyView Lite" app on my phone I was able to point it at Venus and then visually see it. The other advantage of this app is the calming music that plays. I tend to lose patience imaging because something always goes wrong, but honestly the music seemed to reduce my stress. This may sounds nuts, but I think I will use this app every time I image just to get the calming benefits...

 

Regards,

Steve