Tuesday 12 May 2020

Testing AstroDMx Capture for macOS on Venus and M3

Testing AstroDMx Capture for macOS


Testing fast exposures on Venus

A Skymax 127 Maksutov was mounted on a Celestron AVX mount. A ZWO ASI178MC camera fitted with a 2.5x Barlow was placed at the Cassegrain focus of the Maksutov,

AstroDMx Capture for macOS was running on a Catalina MacBook Air. A 15,000-frame undebayered SER file of Venus was captured with a region of interest of 800 x 608 at 166 fps.

Screenshot of AstroDMx Capture for macOS capturing data on Venus.


The best 5% of the frames in the file were stacked in Autostakkert! 3.1 with RGB channel alignment. The final image was wavelet processed in Registax 6 and post processed in the Gimp 2.10.

14.7% crescent Venus


Testing long exposures on M3

The equipment used


A Skymax 127 Maksutov was mounted on a Celestron AVX mount. A ZWO ASI178MC camera fitted with a 0.5 focal reducer was placed at the Cassegrain focus of the Maksutov,

AstroDMx Capture for macOS running on the MacBook Air. 70 x 15s exposures were captured of M3, with 20 matching dark-frames.

Screenshot of AstroDMx Capture for macOS capturing data on M3


The images were stacked in Deep Sky Stacker and the resulting stack, post-processed in the Gimp 2.10 and FastStone viewer.

M3

AstroDMx Capture for macOS is almost finished as is the Windows version. More testing of the code for race conditions etc, fixing any remaining bugs after a huge code refactoring and both versions will be released.
The releases will be announced here.