Moon using an OIII filter on an 80mm

This was taken on 14th November 2013. I took it using my Altair Astro triplet 80mm refractor with an Atik 314L+ camera through an Astronomik OIII filter.

I took 20 frames of 1/1000th of a second (the lowest exposure the Atik 314L+ will do). I then stacked it in Maxim DL. I did not remove any darks or take any flats. I then took it into Photoshop and sharpened it and then used a high pass filter on it to sharpen it a bit more.

Not my best lunar image, you can tell the difference between doing this image on a 80mm refractor compared to an image I took using a 120mm refractor. The 120mm just gives you more contrast, light and generally a better image. You can see the 120mm moon image here: https://www.astronomylog.co.uk/2011/09/15/harvest-full-moon/

But if you want really sharp lunar images then a webcam type camera is a better idea, where you can take up to hundreds of frames a second and just take the best frames and stack those all automatically in programs like Registax. Here is an image where I did just that and created a mosaic: https://www.astronomylog.co.uk/2013/03/20/moon-mosaic-with-altair-astro-8-gso-rc/

QHY IMG132E Camera Images and Review

My good friend Mick Jenkins has just purchased a new QHY IMG132E camera from Modern Astronomy, and he has had a really good first night with the QHY IMG132E camera.

Mick has a Meade LX200 8″ telescope and was previously using a Celestron NexImage for lunar and planetary imaging.

Mick was stated as saying “I am very impressed with the image quality of the camera, the colour range, tonal range and sharpness. Jupiter shows Io and its shadow on the cloud tops and greater detail in the bands. All the Moon photos have a greater tonal range and detail compared with the webcam, the Cassini image was taken at 1200 x 1000 at 27 fps 600 frames”.

He went on to say “It wasn’t a particularly good night with some high cloud and I had to load the software and learn the new software, there are a lot more controls than the webcam, this QHY IMG132E has a lot of potential and I am looking forward to imaging Saturn and Mars”.

So he was very impressed with it, which makes me wonder if I should get one as well. I currently have an Imaging Source DMK21 mono, which is great for lunar and solar imaging, but it’s a pain having to change the filters to get a colour planetary image, so I may go for a colour camera next time, plus the DMK21 640×480 size is a bit small sometimes, so a bigger chip like the one on the QHY IMG132E would be better.

But let’s look at the images:

All images by Mick Jenkins 2012