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Post by Rick in NWArk on Jun 28, 2014 6:13:04 GMT
I'm pleased to say that even with my significant mount issues, I was able to get my first DSOs thru my MC Jr Pro thru my MC VRC8.
I started off with the basic settings for a bright DSO as described in the camera documentation. For F/R, I used the MFR-5. I started by using just the A&B parts put together, as the documentation for the MFR-5 confused me since I had more & different parts than the photos in the PDF. So I have no idea what F/ I was running on the 8" f/8 VRC. I'm guessing .5 reduction, so maybe I was at F/4?
So, after realizing my mount was off, I decided to go after M4 since it was close to Arcturas and would be easy to manually slew to, which I did. I got the fuzzy in the eyepiece and I'll tell you -- I had some bad seeing because it was super fuzzy in the 20mm eyepiece. But toss in the camera and it got a lot better quick. I got 2 images that will seem like "meh" to most, but hey its a start and I learned more later that night.
Image 1 is a 2s capture and the second is a 7s capture. Like I said, a lot more work here I can do to play with settings and much longer exposures. Image 1 Image 2
(Sorry Chris A., I didn't chat because I was wrangling with my own setup)
Along the way, I discovered hot pixels! Seems like I got an awful lot of them. Hot Pix
M4 was getting pretty low, so I decided to go after something higher and so I went after the Ring Nebula. I started off by changing the Jr Pro to the suggested settings for a faint DSO and I started with a 5s image (Ring 1) and then a 15s image (Ring 2) for kicks. I was floored by the color and in this so-so seeing, I even got the central star. Ring 1 Ring 2
So now I got ambitious. I removed the MFR5 and added spacers and re-centered the Ring again. Now I went with a 15s image (Ring 3), went way overboard and pushed it to 30s (Ring 4) and pulled it back a bit to 23s (Ring 5). There were no fnords. Ring 3 Ring 4 Ring 5
Oh and by the way, with my VidCap device fried, I was left with taking pictures of my LCD monitor with my iPhone - so naturally the images on the monitor were way better than how they came out in these pics.
I'm pretty excited about my results so far.
--Rick
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Post by johnno on Jun 28, 2014 13:21:27 GMT
Good first attempts Rik, taking a photo from a image on the monitor with a camera never does justice for the captured image.
Hopefully someone with knowledge of this camera can give you some tips on how to get the best out of it, as always its a learning curve with new equipment
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Post by Deleted on Jun 28, 2014 13:43:54 GMT
Great stuff Rik looks like you well on the way!
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Post by Dragon Man on Jun 28, 2014 16:06:37 GMT
Good going Rick. You may not have noticed when you were posting your images but Ring 3 & 5 are the same image If you click on the 'Add Image to post' tab at the top of each text box it will put your pics into your post
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Post by Deleted on Jun 29, 2014 11:15:04 GMT
Sounds like your up against it with your mount issues man! Get that sorted asap! Must be a pain to need to put in an eyepiece and manually find everything before putting your camera in. GOTO is a must to be honest Great start tho! Nice pics! Its all a big learning curve and will get much easier with practice! For me.. when i started... i found that it was all about managing 4 different settings! Exposure, Brightness, Contrast and AGC(Gain). I would say typical settings i would use on DSO's would be Brightness = 0, Contrast = 100, AGC = 4, Exposure = The max i can go before blowing out the image and going full white.
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Post by Rick in NWArk on Jun 29, 2014 18:16:22 GMT
Good going Rick. You may not have noticed when you were posting your images but Ring 3 & 5 are the same image If you click on the 'Add Image to post' tab at the top of each text box it will put your pics into your post Ooops, thanks Ken... it should be Image 5. Thanks for the advice on adding image, but I already had it loaded in my Flickr.
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Post by Rick in NWArk on Jun 29, 2014 18:20:00 GMT
Sounds like your up against it with your mount issues man! Get that sorted asap! Must be a pain to need to put in an eyepiece and manually find everything before putting your camera in. GOTO is a must to be honest Great start tho! Nice pics! Its all a big learning curve and will get much easier with practice! For me.. when i started... i found that it was all about managing 4 different settings! Exposure, Brightness, Contrast and AGC(Gain). I would say typical settings i would use on DSO's would be Brightness = 0, Contrast = 100, AGC = 4, Exposure = The max i can go before blowing out the image and going full white. You said it, Chris, its a major pain. Cant wait to get a quality vidcap device to share even better pics.
I'm trying to only change one thing at a time -- I figure that's the best way to learn what to adjust.
Thanks everyone for your comments!
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