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. |