Testing AstroDMx Capture for macOS on Venus and M3 with a ZWO ASI178MC and a Skymax 127 Maksutov

Testing AstroDMx Capture for macOS

Testing fast exposures on Venus

Using Skymax 127 Maksutov on a Celestron AVX mount, and a ZWO ASI178MC camera fitted with a 2.5x Barlow.

Click on an image to get a closer view

With AstroDMx Capture for macOS running on a Catalina MacBook Air, a 15,000-frame 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 SER 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

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Testing long exposures on M3

Using Skymax 127 Maksutov on a Celestron AVX mount, and a ZWO ASI178MC camera fitted with a 0.5 focal reducer

With AstroDMx Capture for macOS running on a Catalina 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.

Steve Wainwright and Nicola Mackin