TheSkySearchers

Hey all,

Here is an Animation I took the other night of Jupiter with IO peeking out from the back and Europa's shadow transiting as well as itself. Using Firecapture I took 176 (60sec) captures each with about 12,200 frames per capture and used 5% in AutoStackert. It totals up to about 3 hours. So about 2,150,000 individual frames were used and about 500gb's of Data. (I had fun processing)

The seeing was pretty decent 3/5 and was tempted to break out the barlow but played it safe incase the skies turned and wanted to make sure I got some detail.

After Autostakert I took each Tiff file and used a script in Photoshop with an New Action of a small "S Curv in curves" to bring it out a little. (The action was put on every frame to make it even) PhotoshopCC does this automatically if you go to FIle/Scripts/Image Process. And then converted each file to JPEG with Max compression, then off to PIPP for the Giff Animation.

I wish I could of went longer to get the GRS more in the center but it got light out and went over a house.

Celestron C-11
ZWO 385MC with Baader M & Sky Glow
ZWI ADC
Skywatcher EQ6-R
RIGEL Nstep focuser

Anyway thanks for looking

Now that's cool. I wonder why I haven't seen this post before? Thanks for sharing.

Awsome animation, that's alot of stacks!

Thanks The Solar System section is lonely.

I automated the captures in FireCapture to 60 seconds and just let it run for the 176 minutes. The stacks took a while to process and did it in three separate 2-3 hour sessions. The easiest part was in Photoshop with creating an Action to do the same exact processing techniques to every frame. It was all Automated in one batch, Thank the Lord. But processing took the longest.

I was planning on doing another animation for the 21st but that is when my mount DEC thing happened.

Excellent!

Great animation.

Very good!
Seldom seen an animation which lasted for so long, over such a long period of time and went so smoothly! And nicely detailed on top!
Compliments!

How did you run capture for 3 hours and not have to refocus on such a big mirror, where I am the temps drop all night long and going down 1/2 deg can cause the focus to go out.

Wow, that is insane!! So smooth in the animation; I can't believe the amount of frames!
Love the detail, thanks for sharing!

All the best,

yobbo89 wrote: ↑Wed Jul 01, 2020 9:07 am How did you run capture for 3 hours and not have to refocus on such a big mirror, where I am the temps drop all night long and going down 1/2 deg can cause the focus to go out.

Thanks all

Hey Rob,

I am using the RIGEL NStep USB auto focus system. And it allowed me to easily adjust little incriments and also a tip from JT was to adjust focusing during a run. My Laptop screen sucks and has that color variation at different angles and hard to make out planet detils, So I bought a 22" LED Monitor for $80 and housed it on top of my laptop and use a wireless keyboard and mouse All of this fits inside a Box I made to keep dew out. I see the planet much better now since it is bigger, so when I noticed it was not as it should be I hit the RIGEL Nstep buttons to correct in both directions during the 60 seconds until it looked right. Also after every 30 min or so I would stop the Auto run and quickly refocus more (by Zooming in) with the RIGEL Nstep so only 10-15 sec would go by.

Quality animation with lovely detail, impressive.