Gallery 8 - The SAC IV Gallery

 

For Christmas 2002 I received a SAC IV camera. It is a modified web cam that is controlled using the Astrovideo software program. This page contains my images from my early attempts to use this camera with which I hope to image the sun, moon and planets. It is light weight (less then many EP) and plugs into the USB slot of the laptop like a web cam. I'd installed the drivers earlier and when I went out to use it the first time I had an image on the screen in less then 5 minutes. At first the image was "red" but this responded to turning down the "saturation control". The seeing was "bad" but I imaged the moon and Saturn. I collected these as 20 second long AVI files and used Astrovideo's "find sharpest" feature to select the 10 sharpest frames. These were averaged in Astrostack. The two below were shot at prime focus with a 90mm Meade ETX.

9 frames averaged (three bigger craters are from left to right: Arzachei, Alphonsi, and Ammonius - ain't Latin grand?)

10 frames averaged, unsharp masking set at 3 iterations with a 5x5 Gaussian PSF.

 

These were shot on 1/11-12/03 with the SAC IV

(click the thumbnails for a bigger image)

The featured objects were the moon and Saturn. Seeing was awful. Images were acquired with AstroVideo and I used AstroVideo's select sharpest to grab the best 10 frames out of runs that were 150-300 frames long. I then added as FITS files with AstroVideo using either manual or automatic frame add. I think that manual does a better job but I did not change any parameters on the automatic mode. I used the Discovery 10" f5.6 on the 20" scope's Tom Ospowski dual axis aluminum platform - it is easier to center with at high power.

320x240 mode; Mare Serenitatis

640x480 mode; Mare Serenitatis

the crater to the left with the mountain is Tycho, the crater at the top is Longomontanus, the bottom crater is Wilhelm

Crater Clavius

Copernicus and Erathostenes

The center right crater is Copernicus, the center left crater is Erathostenes, above right of Copernicus is Reinhold & Reinhold B

SAC IV on 10" f5.6 with 2.5x barlow

SAC IV on 10" f5.6 at prime focus

NGC 2169 shot with StellaCam EX not SAC IV

Reprocessed Planet Images

I reprocessed some of these images with REGISTAX. This improved the detail and brought out some of the color in the images shot with the SAC IV.

4 attempts at reprocessing (different data runs)

the same images magnified

 

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