On Feb 17, 11:33 am, Thomas Dickens wrote:
Can over-magnification combined with bad seeing result in a loss of
color in Webcam photos?

Last night I tried imaging Saturn with a ToUCam Pro, 8" Celestron, and
3x Meade TeleXtender. (The 3x is new and I wanted to try it out - the
seeing was way too poor.)

I used the same setup last year, but with a 2x Barlow, and got very
colorful images, but last night's show almost no color. (I checked to
make sure the camera settings were not set to BW, and the camera shows
color indoors, so that's not the problem.)

Also, I was using 15 fps, 1/33 sec exposures.

Any comments?

Thanks,
Tom

Hi:

Yes, a dim image will be less saturated. What can you do? Pour on more
aperture, or wait for better transparency, or crank up the
"saturation" control a bit. You can also slow down that exposure. In
my experience, 15fps is WAY too high. 5fps is much better noise/
compression-wise. If seeing is really bad, you can crank up to 10fps,
but you'll need to lower the shutter speed. If the seeing is bad
enough that you can't get a decent on-screen image at 5 - 10fps, you
should probably pack it in, anyway. In my experience, unless you're
seeing a reasonably stable and reasonably detailed image (banding and
Cassini easy) you're probably not gonna get the results you long for
anyway. Be of good cheer, spring and (I hope) more stable skies are
coming.

Unk Rod