I have a Televue Powermate 4x barlow lens that I purchased for doing planetary capture. I had never tried to set it up on my Edge HD 11"telescope, which has a native focal length of 2,800mm. I decided it was time to give it bash, with the aim of capturing Saturn (spoiler: still not managed Saturn, more later!).
Not wasn't exactly sure what I would need to get an image in terms of adapters etc. so with a selection of bits from the observatory, in between the clouds on a hot humid night and nice bright moon which was easy to find, it was now or never.
First, up I removed my normal optical train off the back of the OTA, namely, the 0.7x reducer, the OAG and the ASI2600mc camera.
I had acquired a Baader SCT 2" click lock adapter that would connect directly onto the back of the OTA, attached it, and slotted in a 2" diagonal. Now, I knew this had worked before when I was messing around with an eyepiece, so was a good starting point.
Inserting the Powermate 4x barlow into the diagonal followed by an ASI174mm camera directly onto the Powermate, with no extensions and no adapter.
Connected up the USB cable to the camera and fired up SharpCap 4.0.
On the software, connected to the camera, set around a 20ms exposure length and a high gain. I do this as the mount wasn't star aligned, and means I can slew around and watch the histogram and it will easily show 'something' is approaching or there.
With the mount only polar aligned and not star aligned (for normal deep sky imaging, plate solving takes car of this), I set it off where it thinks the Moon is. Sure enough nothing showed up on the screen, it was simply a case of slewing around and watching the histogram, and the Moon quickly came into view.
Now I could dial back the exposure and gain a touch so it didn't look washed out, and also adjust the focus and we had the moon in view.
Using SharpCap I grabbed 30 second videos and processed them through Autostakkert, Registax and PixInsight and here is what I captured.
I still need to work out the names of the craters / features, except Plato, I know that one!
I captured these during a livestream on Youtube, the video is at the end of this page.
Here is the video of the livestream when I captured these;
That's all for this update, so until next time, Clear Skies!
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