Making a Nikon P1000 stable to be able to take moon & star shots

[Neil WyattModerator @neilwyatt]

Also, Steve,have a shot at Jupiter and Saturn they are low down but your rig should easily show Jupiter's bands and Saturn's rings.

Later in the year Mars will be much higher and pretty large so a good target too.

Neil

[SteviegtrParticipant @steviegtr]

Posted by Neil Wyatt on 27/06/2020 11:15:16:

Also, Steve,have a shot at Jupiter and Saturn they are low down but your rig should easily show Jupiter's bands and Saturn's rings.

Later in the year Mars will be much higher and pretty large so a good target too.

Neil

Neil thank you for all those links & help. I will take a look at them. Some of my pics have been taken in raw image so i can enhance. I have Photoshop & Luminar 4 on the p.c so will have a play & see if i can improve. I watched a few of the Lady from Ohio doing moon & star shots on youtube. Diversity J. She always talks of stacking. She has a nice motor drive tracker on hers.

I have learned to become thick skinned to the Sniper comments. Maybe it's some folks vocation in life. Never mind. I will persevere.

The tripod is pretty rock steady without any wind around. The main problem is the flagged area has a few wobbly areas so i have to tread carefully.

A friend has a theodolite & wooden tripod of which i could give a try at some point. Just the tripod that is.

Regards.

Steve.

[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

Posted by Steviegtr on 27/06/2020 13:21:12:

Posted by Neil Wyatt on 27/06/2020 11:15:16:

Also, Steve,have a shot at Jupiter and Saturn they are low down but your rig should easily show Jupiter's bands and Saturn's rings.

Later in the year Mars will be much higher and pretty large so a good target too.

Neil

Neil thank you for all those links & help. I will take a look at them. Some of my pics have been taken in raw image so i can enhance. I have Photoshop & Luminar 4 on the p.c so will have a play & see if i can improve. I watched a few of the Lady from Ohio doing moon & star shots on youtube. Diversity J. She always talks of stacking. She has a nice motor drive tracker on hers.

I have learned to become thick skinned to the Sniper comments. Maybe it's some folks vocation in life. Never mind. I will persevere.

The tripod is pretty rock steady without any wind around. The main problem is the flagged area has a few wobbly areas so i have to tread carefully.

A friend has a theodolite & wooden tripod of which i could give a try at some point. Just the tripod that is.

Regards.

Steve.

 

What an interesting camera! I guess the main advantage of an extreme zoom lens is the ability to trot around without a ton of equipment and take lots of opportunistic short and long range shots. Zoom flexibility is why I favour my Bridge Camera over an SLR when out and about.

Not all is wonderful with zooms though as Steve is finding out! Blurry noisy pictures due to shake, atmospheric turbulence, and poor light gathering (because the lens is limited by aperture and complex optics.) For moon shots it won't compete with a camera carefully matched to a telescope on an equatorial mount.

Shake is reduced by a rigid mount, but relatively poor light gathering means pictures take long enough for the moon to move during the exposure whilst the camera winds up the sensitivity (and becomes noisy). Add atmospheric turbulence and it's hard to get a really good picture with single shot. Frame stacking is excellent for this work. A large number of images are averaged to remove noise and reduce turbulence, maybe realigning as well. Once Stacking software is understood it's easier than messing with Raw and delivers better results.

A big advantage of digital cameras are their built-in settings optimised for particular circumstances. Have you tried the camera's 'Moon Mode' yet Steve? Also, does your Manfrotto have a hook under the head? – if so, it's for hanging a heavy bag underneath to drop the centre of gravity and reduce wobble. It also helps to shorten tripod legs as much as possible, even if you have to sit in a puddle.

The P1000 isn't a camera I'd buy for astronomy, but I'd sure have fun with one! Should perform very well at more ordinary zooms.

Dave

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 27/06/2020 14:45:00

[SteviegtrParticipant @steviegtr]

Dave, i did not buy the camera solely for astro pics although i am enjoying doing some. I, when weather permits like to ride up to the Moors. Especially around the Kettlewell & Hawes area. So will look forward to taking some photo's around those places. The Camera as you say has the achilles heel having a small sensor & such a large zoom.

The tripod does have a hook, so will try the weight.

I did get myself a dinky camera too. It is the Sony cyber-shot RX100 MK7. That has a 24-200 zoom. So small it fits in my pocket so i do not always have to lug around the extremely heavy P1000.

It is all relatively new to me, so will take a bit of getting used to. The menu on both are pretty vast & on the small RX is pretty mental. Lots of reading / study/ experience needed.

Incidentally i bought everything apart from the telephoto support 2nd hand. The sum of the 2 is about what i was going to pay for just 1 new one. Sorry that is my way of justifying spending hmm.

Regards.

Steve.

[SteviegtrParticipant @steviegtr]

Wonder if Neil or anyone else can tell me what this planet is. I took it at around 03:30 Sunday morning from the Leeds area. It was in the west around where the Moon had been earlier. To see with the naked eye it was a tiny spot in the distance. It was the only star visible at that time.

It was also travelling fast & i had trouble keeping the camera on it. Is this Jupitor ????

Steve.

[Neil WyattModerator @neilwyatt]

Posted by SillyOldDuffer on 27/06/2020 14:43:55:

Shake is reduced by a rigid mount, but relatively poor light gathering means pictures take long enough for the moon to move during the exposure whilst the camera winds up the sensitivity (and becomes noisy). Add atmospheric turbulence and it's hard to get a really good picture with single shot. Frame stacking is excellent for this work. A large number of images are averaged to remove noise and reduce turbulence, maybe realigning as well. Once Stacking software is understood it's easier than messing with Raw and delivers better results.

Actually the moon is plenty bright enough for short exposures, usually ~1/200 with my camera. Aside from the Sun and Venus its the brightest object we regularly image! You need to be over a few seconds for noticeable blur even at extreme focal lengths. Noise is less of an issue with short exposures. After tens of seconds you need to subtract dark frames, and its when you get up to ~5 minutes you ideally need to cool the sensor. I don't normally use darks for lunar or planetary images.

Turbulence (we call it seeing) is different. These short exposures 'freeze' the seeing so you don't get wobble, but seeing can put areas into soft focus and it does distort. Stacking of the type used for the moon breaks the subject up into small areas stacked individually and pieced together like a jigsaw to remove this distortion.

True 'lucky imaging' technique is based on seeking out the rarest moments of clarity when taking short exposures, but experimenting with sacking different percentages of the frames the best result can typically be with anywhere between 10 to 80%. With relatively few exposures (say <100) the noise reduction of stacking more frames outweighs the 'lucky image' effect, but with, say, 1000-5000 frames you don't need a huge percentage to make noise irrelevant and can be fussier about which frame to use.

Choosing the stacking parameters (ways of garding images, percentage to stack, number of alignment points etc.) are one of the ways experience and 'art' buts up against the science.

Where it gets really hairy is imaging things like Jupiter, more than two minutes of video and it's likely to rotate enough to blur your images. But you can use software to derotate individual frames. More usually, you take several short runs, stack individually then de-rotate and combine the best runs.

[Neil WyattModerator @neilwyatt]

Posted by Steviegtr on 28/06/2020 23:18:55:

Wonder if Neil or anyone else can tell me what this planet is. I took it at around 03:30 Sunday morning from the Leeds area. It was in the west around where the Moon had been earlier. To see with the naked eye it was a tiny spot in the distance. It was the only star visible at that time.

It was also travelling fast & i had trouble keeping the camera on it. Is this Jupitor ????

Steve.

Mars is rising in the east around sunrise, while Jupiter (followed by Saturn, less bright, is nearer to due South.

If it was in the west and you could actually see it moving (rather than drifiting around that same rate as the moon) it was probably the ISS or just possibly another bright satellite.

[SteviegtrParticipant @steviegtr]

Well since my 1st post on this subject i have purchased a Skywatcher AZ-GTI. It is a gamechanger. i can now track a lot better than with the gear head from Manfrotto. I took this off the Manfrotto pro tripod & fitted the AZ-GTI. The driver comes from a phone app & seems to work very well. The only trouble now is i have some very late nights. I got some stunning video's of Saturn & its rings. Also some decent shots of Jupitor & it's moons. At some point i will post them on You tube & post a link for the few interested parties. Uninterested parties please refrain from slagging me.

Steve.

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