Saturn 14th January

[Rocket Pooch]

Hi,

This is probably going to be one of the last Saturns with the Vixen before the OO Scope gets put on the mount.  It was taken at F27 through the VC200L, you will see the rings are closing fast now.

Chris



F36 version will be on the way soon.

[Fay]

Chris, that is a very nice image but what does F27 & F36 & OO?

thanks,
Fay

[Ian]

well OO is the sound you make

[Rocket Pooch]

Sorry the Vixen is an 8" @ F9, with a 3x barlow it gives F27 (5.6 meters focal length) with the 4x F36 (7.48 meters focal length).  I have not got round to processing the images fully yet, and to be honest I don't think they are all that great because the Vixen is not designed for this type of work.

The OO is the Orion Optics scope I have, this is a 10" F6.3 which will give F25.2 (6.8 meter focal length), however the central obstruction of the OO is 10% and the mirror, 1/8th wave and 97% reflectivity on the mirrors, it captures a lot more light.  This will give a higher signal to noise ratio and allow for better imaging.  But it's not on the mount at the moment, I have been too lazy to get out there and do it, maybe next week.

The image scale on the Vixen (size of Saturn, its bigger using the Vixen) with 4x barlow is better, but the OO will give better detail when collimated, so I would expect the image from the OO to be much sharper and also have better definition, but be smaller, but lets see.

Also I'm going to stack the barlows with the OO, it has enough light grasp to take it and use a B&W cam for the L channel and the ToUCam for the RGB elements.  This is going to involve quite a learning curve over the next three months or so.

But let's see how it goes.

Chris


P.S. If you have two hours and a bottle of wine read through this it explains why some telescopes are better than others at cirtain types of imaging, honest.  http://www.telescope-optics.net/index.html

[Fay]

Thanks, Chris, I'm glad I asked for clarification of those details.
Unfortunately I think I have soaked up about 1% of the answer!!

Fay

[Rocket Pooch]

ok, but don't worry 1% is a good start