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TOM WILLIAMSON
E-Mail  twilliamson@nmmnh.state.nm.us

I've used an old Panasonic videocamera for capturing the moon and planets over a couple of years and, based largely on the recommendations found on VideoAstro, finally purchased a PC-23C video camera last month. The results I've obtained thus far have greatly exceed my expectations. These images were made using the PC-23C with my 8" f/7 Newtonian on a german equatorial mount. The image of Saturn was obtained on the very first night I used the video camera (Oct. 26, 2000; about 8:00 UT) and is an average of 65 frames @f/73 (eyepiece projection using a 7.5 mm Plossl). The Jupiter image (through a W#38A filter) was taken on Nov. 11, 2000 (about 8:20 UT) and is an average of 57 frames. The images were first recorded to a standard (cheap) VHS video recorder and later grabbed with a Snappy (v. 2.1), stacked with Astrostack (v. 0.9), and manipulated with Adobe Photoshop 5.5 (levels, unsharp masking, Gaussian blurring) to achieve the final results here. Please feel free to share these with the group. I thank you and the group for the excellant advice that has allowed me to obtain these images, and hopefully, even better images in the future.

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Saturn and Jupiter imaged with the PC23C at f/73 using an homemade 8" f/7 Newtonian on a GEM mount.  Eyepiece projection was used to obtain f/73 using a 7.5mm Plossl.  The Saturn image is the result of stacking 52 images while the Jupiter image is made up of 59 images.  Note the surface feature visible on Ganymede and the close proximity to it's shadow just below the GRS.
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