Mars

[escho]

MLV-App did a big part of the work in this picture. Without processing with MLV-App, I didn´t get any details:
https://sternenkarten.com/2018/07/20/mars-am-20-juli-2018/
Edgar

[g3gg0]

how do you compensate the atmospheric turbulences?
when i look through my maksutov mto-11ca i quickly tend to forget all ideas about shooting photos of planets.

[Danne]

Mars. This is sick. Awesome.

[Levas]

Wow nice one!

Don't have proper reach for this, don't have a telescope.
My maximum reach is 280mm (70-200 with a 1.4 converter)
But I like to shoot the sky now and then, also happened to shoot a video of Mars last Teusday to Wednesday night.
A lot worse then your shot, but I think the result isn't that bad for 280mm maximum reach 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1RBadPYSXcnF1C5fm-ZS3SKewGmHQRqP2

Used some super resolution trickery to get some more reach.
I've resized the frames to 4x times the original size, and used pyflow to smooth things out:
https://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=20999.msg193367#msg193367
after that I additionally rescaled it 2 times the size in Davinci resolve, so I guess the size should be comparible to 4 x 2 x 280mm = 2240 mm 

[pnwhikerz]

I thought i would throw this at all of you, here is a short timelapse video
of Mars Rising with Milky Way, shot on 07/13/2018 starting around 11:15 PM Pacific Standard Time,
at McClellan View Point, Gifford Pinchot National Forest, Washington, USA. My Original purpose was
to catch the sunset and do some light painting but tourist with questions side tracked that idea and
got all this by mistake, only problem heading back home at 2:35am in the morning  a snag fell across
the road almost hiting the passenger side of the vehicle, woke up real fast after that.
Canon T3i/600D DSLR Stats:
Manual Mode/ Bulb Mode
Magic Lantern Intervalometer; Take a shot every 5 seconds, Number of shots 310
Shutter Speed: 30 Seconds
Aperatue: 2.8
ISO 3200
WB 4000
Lens 11/16 Focal Length 11m

You Can Watch At This WEB LINK:  http://www.pnwhiker.org/mcmway/mcmkway.htm

[escho]

@g3gg0

Seeing and turbulences wasn´t too bad. But Mars was not very high above the horizont (ca. 14°), so much athmosphere between Mars and me.
The reason for the missing details was anaoter. Since one or two month there is a global dust-storm on Mars. And tihs storm draws a curtain over big parts of the surface.
To minimize the distortions of the athmosphere, I waited for a moment, the stars wasn´t twinkling too loud. An I did lucky imaging. That means recording a short video (18.000 frames) and taking the best of the frames for stacking.

As a worm-up for Mars I recorded Jupiter. The altitude of Jupiter was similar to Mars, about 14 degrees. I saw a nice little planet through the okular of the telescope (focal lenght 6 meter) and I saw clearly the four "galileischen Monde". See the result of this worm-up:
https://sternenkarten.com/2018/07/21/jupiter-vom-19-7-2018/

@Danne

ThankYou

@Levas

Hihi, that´s what I did years before, as I didn´t had a telescope yet, just 300mm tele + 1.4 + 1.7 teleconverter        Nice video.

@pnwhikerz

Thanks for sharing.

[Levas]

Always like photographs of planets and other deep sky objects, but I can't get myself to invest in a telescope and tracker, afraid that that is going to be a jump to an expensive hobby. (And photography is already an expensive one  . )

Actually a little curious how your MLV files are looking.
Are you maybe willing to share a MLV file of your mars or Jupiter shot ? (If not no problem, just curious to see the original file and see what I can do with it in post proces.)

[g3gg0]

holy crap. this singe MLV and the resulting picture right next to it blew my mind.
didnt expect that someone could recover so much detail from such single frames...

[escho]

Hey g3gg0, uploaded the single frames just a minute ago to my websitea and you just answered. You are quicker than the light 

OK, to make it officiell. I uploaded single frames to teh threads of Jupiter and Mars to show, what you can get out of such a video. Her again the Links:

Jupiter: https://sternenkarten.com/2018/07/21/jupiter-vom-19-7-2018/
Mars: https://sternenkarten.com/2018/07/20/mars-am-20-juli-2018/

[g3gg0]

this is so impressive. wow. then i might try my cassegrain and see what i can get with it.
any idea/estimation if the MTO-11CA (russentonne) is capable of getting something useful?
or is its 1000mm focal length lost hope and i do better saving the time?

[escho]

Give Jupiter a try, the Russentonne is not so bad from what I,ve heard. But the result will be a bit small. Remember, I recorded with 6 meter focal lenght. Maybe you can add a TC to your MAK . 1000mm focal lenght is fine for the moon. And to freeze the seeing, take short exposure-times (1/64 and quicker)

[Levas]

Wow impressive post processing going on there 

I actually saw the reply of Geggo and went to your linked images again, saw the single frames, thought I missed them the first time, but now I see you just uploaded them 

Too bad I'm on a mac, autostakkert seems to be used by a lot of astrophotographers and giving some real good results.

[escho]

I am running autostackert (the beta version) from Linux openSUSE Tumbleweed using wine. Same with deepskystacker and fitswork.

[Levas]

Aha, got Autostakkert running under wine 
Let's go to my Mars files again

[masc]

Very nice @escho! You'll try to get some nice pictures tomorrow of the lunar eclipse?

[escho]

Yes, I hope the weather is fine. I´ve planned a landscape-timelape with Mars and Moon (EOS600D) and some pics with my little MAK and the 6D (1500mm focal lenght)

[Danne]

Brilliant.

[masc]

I am very interested in the results! 

[escho]

Here are the results of the lunar eclipse, text is in german...

Live-Blog yesterday: https://sternenkarten.com/2018/07/27/totale-mondfinsternis-update/
Pictures: https://sternenkarten.com/2018/07/28/mondfinsternis-und-marsopposition-das-ergebnis/

The weather was bad and no chance to get the teleskope aligned in time. Timelapse wasn´t possible, because there was nothing to timelapse only clouds. But I found some nice stuff in the results. ML was involved with it´s intervalometer and the mirror lockup. Cameras used 600D and 6D. Focal lenghts 24mm, 100mm and 300mm

[g3gg0]

didnt have much luck either.
could see the moon the last 30 minutes, but with my gear it was all too dark to capture properly.

here a 2500-image merge of the moon right after it left the umbra

[escho]

Nice!
Could you share you camerasettings, please? I had the best results with ISO6400 F 1/5.6 2s on my 6D with 300mm-lens (CR2). Video was not possible.

[Levas]

Had to work till eleven in the evening, so I was too late at home to shot the full lunar eclipse.
Since the eclipse was already halfgone, I went for dual iso shots, to capture both the bright side of the moon and half of the eclipse side.
Used MLV recording in 5 x zoom mode.
-Dual iso 200/6400
-Shutter time 1/40th seconds per frame
Stacked 8 x 16 frames together with the kandao raw+ software and stacked the 8 stacked frames together again to one frame (so a total of 128 frames stacked together) and edited the resulting DNG in Lightroom.

[Danne]

Wow, could you upload the original file?

[masc]

Ah, what a shame @escho... here some km in the north of you we have seen a very little more. We also had some clouds but I don't have the right gear to make good photos...
You all got nice shots!

[g3gg0]

Nice!
Could you share you camerasettings, please? I had the best results with ISO6400 F 1/5.6 2s on my 6D with 300mm-lens (CR2). Video was not possible.

1. MLV, 1920x1080, ISO200, 1/33, Maksutov MTO-11CA
2. mlvfs -> lightroom -> TIF (without editing)
3. ~4200 frames into autostakkert 3.0.14 to stack 60% of the images
4. used fitswork to apply a handcrafted deconvolution filter
5. applied some gamma correction

my first real try of this toolchain.

the total lunar eclipse was close to impossible to shoot properly.
had to use FPS override to 500ms exposure time to see a faint image of the moon with ISO3200.
then shot a MLV with 1000ms exposure time, but with the moon being imaged only partially (crop_rec)
but autostakkert has trouble detecting the motion properly

[Levas]

@Danne, uploaded here the original files:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/12c7fp5ymfV8YbmgA8p-otTZ6pk9Kp2U6?usp=sharing

Curious what other people can do with the stack-128frames.dng file.
I already used a lot of postprocessing in Lightroom to keep the darker site of the moon nice, it's rather posterized, since there is not much data there.
I unsharpened the darker part to get rid of the posterizing.

[Levas]

@Geggo

I see you're using a mto-11ca.
I bought a used Samyang 500mm f6.3 this week, also looked for a mto-11ca first, but they're all on sale half the world away and shipping costs are huge with that weight 
How is the handling of the mto-11ca, is it also a pain in the ... to get sharp focus ?
The Samyang is said to be really soft in focus, but I'm very happy with the results I got.
Biggest problem is the T-stop, it's almost 2 stops bigger then F-stop on these mirror lenses.
I've also read that some of these mirror lenses have a converter element at the back, not sure if the Samyang has one.
But I find it typical that the lens is about 120mm long, so if the light path is 3 times as long, as it should be for a mirror lens, then it gives about 360mm focal length, maybe add some 50mm more for the T-mount, then it could only reach about 400mm focal length 
Some say, if it has a converter element at the back, removing it could give much sharper results.

[escho]

Ah, what a shame @escho... here some km in the north of you we have seen a very little more. We also had some clouds but I don't have the right gear to make good photos...
You all got nice shots!

Yes, direction north to west all was fine. I saw a nice Venus going down and I saw a bright Jupiter up in the sky. In the other direction: Many clouds...

@g3gg0
Thanks for the data

@Levas
I cannot oven your dng-stack. darktable tells me: Unknown format and I see only the preview-pic. No clue why.

[Levas]

@Escho

I've uploaded a new stacked file in the same map, 'NEW_Stack-128frames.dng'.
I took the stacked dng file and ran it through Adobe DNG converter, so maybe this helps for maximum compatibility.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/12c7fp5ymfV8YbmgA8p-otTZ6pk9Kp2U6?usp=sharing

Not a big user of DarkTable, but I have version 2.2.5 here and the file loads normal, and I can change exposure etc, so are you sure the download is right ?

[escho]

@Levas
Same problem with the new one. Only single_frame_processed.dng loads fine.
Using darktable 2.4.4 here. I will try a git-version of dt later in a VM

[escho]

Single_frame_processed.dng is 4,4 MB
Stack 128_frames.dng only 715 kB

[Levas]

Yeah I did notice the file size difference too.
Single frame is uncompressed DNG and the stacked frame is lossless compressed DNG (LJ92).
There's a lot of black in the frame, so the big size difference between compressed and uncompressed makes sense.
The 4,4 sized single frame becomes 1,4Mb when I use lossless compression with adobe DNG converter.
Still twice the size, but stacking 128 frames reduces a lot of the low light noise data, so that's probably it 

What file type are you using for stacking, like with the Mars and Saturn pictures, do you stack dng's or do you stack processed Tif files ?

[Levas]

@Escho
Now I think about it, maybe an uncompressed stack file works ?
Uploaded an uncompressed stack file, 4,7Mb in size:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=12c7fp5ymfV8YbmgA8p-otTZ6pk9Kp2U6

[escho]

It loads with the uncompressed dng. I think to remember that dattable doesnt like uncompressed tiffs very much. Maybe it´s the sam with dngs?

For the stacking job a use two szenarios:

1. Stacking MLVs
I use mlvapp to precess the files (get more contrast out of it). Than I export to uncompressed avi, which is 8 Bit. That´s what I stack with autostakkert. Than postprocessing with fitswork, darktable and gimp.

2. Stacking CR2s
For autostakkert (sun, moon, planets) I exort to 16 Bit uncompressed tiff.
For deepsky, I use CR2 for stacking or I preprocess with darktabe to tiff and stack than. (deepskystacker or preferred 9fitswork)

[g3gg0]

Than I export to uncompressed avi, which is 8 Bit. That´s what I stack with autostakkert.

any reason why to switch to 8 bits alreary there? i directly used TIFF files to keep most information for autostakkert

[escho]

any reason why to switch to 8 bits alreary there? i directly used TIFF files to keep most information for autostakkert

Yes, it´s by habbit
The old AS2 crashed in getting too much input. (on larger sequenzes on 16bit tiffs). AS3 doesnn´t crash here anymore. But I don´t see much difference in the reults for my planet-images in using 16bit vs. 8bit. So I use 8bit raw-asi for the stacking.
I don´t use mlv-files to get 16bit out (14bit). I use it to have a real 1:1 sensor crop for as much details as possible.