Comet McNaught C2009/R1 with a Mintron and an 11" SCT at f/10

I used an Omega modified 1/2" chip colour Mintron fitted with a light pollution filter to image Comet McNaught. The comet was in the lightest part of the June 21-22 sky, just above and to the west of Capella. I captured 15 min of high quality DVD of the comet and of dark frames. The BMP images were extracted from the DVD with VOB Frame Extractor and the dark-frames were scaled with Dark Frame Scaler. The dark-frame corrected frames were stacked in Registax.

Comet McNaught

Considerable structure is visible in the tail and the movement of the comet against the background stars can be seen by the faint, streaked stars.

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Comet McNaught C2009/R1 with a Mintron

An 80mm f/5 refractor was mounted on a Merlin Altazimuth Autotracking mount with a 1/2" inch chip Mintron fitted with a light pollution filter and an IR/UV cut filter. Comet McNaught was recorded on DVD at high quality for 15min and dark frame data were also recorded.

Comet McNaught C2009/R1

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M57 with Mono and Colour Mintrons and an 11" SCT

I used a half inch chip Monochrome MTV-22S85HC-EX Mintron and a half inch chip OMEGA MTV-72S85H-EX-SW colour Mintron camera at the prime focus of an 11" f/10 SCT. The monochrome image was used as luminance and the colour image was used for chrominance and the two images were combined:

Monochrome Image:

Colour Image:

Combined Image:

The monochrome image captured fine whispy detail at the edges of the nebulae which is visible in the final combined colour image.

Image data and darkframe data were recorded at high quality to DVD. The BMP frames were then recovered from the DVD with no loss of quality using our VOB Frame Extractor software. The darkframes were scaled using our Dark Frame Scaler software. The aspect ratio of the final images was corrected to 4:3

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Solar Image with a 1/2" Chip Monochrome Mintron

A MTV-22S85HC-EX monochrome 1/2" chip Mintron camera was used with a x2 Barlow lens assembly and a H-alpha PST solar scope. Video was captured at shutter speeds to reveal the disk and also to reveal the prominences.
There were numbers of dark filaments as well as some prominences:

The two levels of exposure were combined and the image was colourised to indicate the colour of H-alpha light

Saturn with an Omega 1/2 inch chip colour Mintron video camera

An unexpected clear spell between the clouds allowed an attempt at imaging Saturn.
An OMEGA 1/2" chip colour Mintron was used with a Skymax 127 with the lens assembly of a Skywatcher x2 Barlow (approx 1.5x) and a Revelation 2.5 Barlow produced this image from 2000 captured frames:


Steve Wainwright

RGB images with a monochrome Mintron and a 6" f/5 achromatic refractor

A 6" F/5 Achromatic refractor was mounted on an EQ3-2 polar aligned mount. DVD was captured with red, green and blue filters at each of 256, 64 and 32 frame accumulations. The Mintron 22S85HC-EX 1/2" chip, frame-accumulating video camera also had stacked light pollution and UV/IR cut filters. Opticstar RGB filters and a manual filter wheel were used.

The different images for each colour channel and each level of frame accumulation were stacked in Registax. Then the colour channels were combined using Andrew Sprott's CAP (Colour Alignment Processor) to produce a colour image for each level of frame accumulation which was then processed for levels in the Gimp. Finally the three images for each level of frame accumulation were registered and combined in Andrew Sprott's FIC (Flexible Image Combine) to reveal all parts of the nebula. The Aspect ratio of the image was corrected in the Gimp and the final image was resized down a little.
M42/M43 RGB image

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RGB Colour Imaging with a Monochrome Mintron

I had some help with our first experiments on RGB imaging with an MTV-22S85HC-EX monochrome 1/2" chip Mintron. Wayne Jones of the Swansea Astronomical Society used his 130mm F:900mm Newtonian on a driven equatorial mount. He used Red Green and Blue simple colour filters that are not designated for RGB imaging but which have good characteristics of filtering out the other colours.

The technique he used was to place the Mintron back in the focuser in exactly the same orientation after each filter change. This was essential because there was not enough in focus on the scope to use a filter wheel. He has devised an ingenious way of doing this.

AVIs were captured at different levels of frame accumulation for each filter. The unique frames were extracted from the AVIs using VOB Frame extractor which will work on AVI containers as well as DVD VOB files. The frames were stacked in Registax and the different 'exposures' registered and combined in Flexible Image Combine, which computes a weighted average of the frames used. The resulting monochrome images taken through Red Green and Blue filters were registered and combined into an RGB image in CAP (Colour Alignment Processor). The final image was adjusted for levels, colour balance and saturation in The Gimp image processor.

This is the result obtained by Wayne on March 4th; an RGB image of M42:

I used a Skymax 127 on an equatorial mount with a Kson manual filter wheel.

The Red and Green filters were Opticstar Imaging filters and the blue filter was a Kson filter, somewhat darker than the Opticstar one. With hindsite, maybe this was a mistake. 15 minutes of DVD were recorded with each filter and 10 minutes without a filter. However, for all of the video, a Skywatcher light pollution filter was on the nosepiece of the MTV-22S85HC-EX 1/2" chip monochrome Mintron.
The unique frames were extracted from the DVD VOB files and were stacked in Registax.
The resulting monochrome images were registered and combined as RGB colour layers in the CAP software. The final image was adjusted for levels, colour balance and saturation in The Gimp image processing software.

RGB image of the trapezium area of M42

This was the Luminance image

The RGB image produced above was registered and combined with the Luminance image in FIC (Flexible Image combine) weighted averaging software to produce the LRGB image below. The RGB image was given a weight of 6 with the Luminance image having a weight of 1.

LRGB image of the trapezium area of M42

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New 1/2" colour Deep-Sky Mintron for 2010

The new 1/2" chip colour Deep-Sky Mintron, the 72S85HP-EX-SW OMEGA has wider fileds of view, better colour fidelity and lower amp glow than the previous incredible 1/3" Helix version. This camera was launched at Astrofest.

M82 with the new 1/2" chip colour 72S85HP-EX-SW OMEGA Mintron with a 10" f/4.8 Newtonian

The Cat's eye Nebula with a 10" f/4.8 Newtonian and a x2 Barlow

The previous post in December 2009 gave the proving results for this camera.

Extracting unique Frames from DVD recordings

The Vob file extractor software as described in my December 2009 article in Astronomy Now can be freely downloaded here.

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