hi this is graham from Jenham's Astro in recent videos on my channel i've used this telescope the
skymax 127 to photograph mars jupiter and saturn well in this video we're going to go one better
we're going to look at the next planet out which is the planet uranus so the setup is the skymax
two times barlow and an asi 120 color camera so let's get everything set up wait for it
to get dark and see what we can capture. this is quite a nice night sky is just
approaching dark and even though it's not ideal taking the opportunity of of the cold clear sky
you should be to see the moon is just peeking up over the horizon and it is basically full
so hopefully it's not gonna impact the imaging of Uranus very much
as with most asteroid photography there's a little bit of trial and error
involved
so this is what Uranus looks like with the 127 on Firecapture now capturing some frames at the
moment so seeing the image in black and white and i've reduced the exposure down to 30 milliseconds
and it's pretty faint but the idea is that i'm going to try to get quite a few frames like this
even though it seems like the object is very very faint and then we'll see if we get a decent stack
on the histogram it's really hardly registering anything just noise so it's
completely different to imaging mars or jupiter and it looks like it's going to be a bit tricky
simply because the level of light the number of photons going into the camera is so much lower
So a couple of other things to note got the gain basically 97 almost all the way up and because
i don't want to create a huge file i've set the capture to be only 320 by 240 pixels so we're
capturing away at about 30 frames per second but the file itself isn't going to be very big
which is always useful with imaging because you might end up with gigabytes and gigabytes of data
which uh certainly in my case the laptop does tend to complain in the end.
okay so that's three thousand frames i'm gonna stop the capture
and you'll see that because i've got Firecapture set here to
debayer the image it's gone back to colour whilst we're focusing and you'll see also i hope that
if you come down here to pre-processing i'm running the the live stacking function so this is
helping me to see a better image of Uranus because it's stacking five frames on top of each other and
it makes the image brighter than it would be if we weren't using that function so it's quite handy.
and then if we just come back up to the settings
check the focus so let's just put the exposure way up and see
what we get
now when i last tried this i was imaging around this sort of exposure 80 to 90
milliseconds and i found that really couldn't get a satisfactory planet in the end so that's
why i've reduced the capture to much shorter exposure but yeah is it in focus? hard to tell
so what are the results like well this is the basic avi file coming out the camera
and it's in black and white because i'm recording in raw and it looks pretty grainy
so the first thing i did was i took the file through the Autostakkert tool set it to three
times drizzle and put the noise level up to to level seven and that resulted in quite a
faint output as you can see but it's blue uh it's promising but there's a little bit of fringing as
well you can see yellow on the top and blue on the bottom so basically then i took that frame into
Registax did an RGB align played around with the contrast and got this result
and then finally i took the Registax file into Paintshop and just played around with
sharpening the image and trying to reduce a little bit of noise
and this is the end result i'm reasonably happy with really considering that i've tried on three
or four nights and here's a preview on the left here is a previous attempt which was total failure
with a much longer exposure the ultimate image was just blobby and clearly you need to try
and get the exposure down even if it means that when you're capturing Uranus it looks very faint
so thanks for watching i hope it's been useful bit of a challenge to get the 127 looking at
a much fainter target, if you've enjoyed this video then please subscribe to Jenham's Astro
and hopefully you better see lots more videos like this one using small telescopes and maybe
pushing to see what you can achieve with a relatively modest kit okay thanks for watching