First Light with my QHY5L-II Colour Camera

So as I mentioned in my last post I bought myself a new Planetary Camera which was the QHY5L-II Colour. As luck would have it, the day after I received the camera there was a lovely clear and calm night which enabled me to give it a test.

My first little play was in using the double star Castor as a focusing point. Whilst using it for focusing I decided to take a picture of it because the camera was actually showing the split.The colour is a little off because I forgot to set the white balance at this point in the imaging run but some playing about in Photoshop has at least improved it a little.

Next up was everyone's favourite planet, Jupiter. This lovely bright planet was something I used to like using my old Xbox Webcam for so with this camera I was hoping for better. Unsurprisingly it was just as good as I expected and I clearly picked up Io and Europa as an added bonus. I will have to say that I once again tried using my barlow which resulted in a terrible image. I have actually done a bit of reading on this and I think the problem is something to do with the small pixel size and the high Focal Length of the telescope being pushed too high when using the barlow. Oh well, the barlow is good for visual work at least until I potentially get a faster scope with a bigger aperture.

After Jupiter I turned to the Moon and decided to view and image a couple more objects from the Lunar 100. First up was L5 which is the crater Corpernicus. This archetypal large complex crater has a discernible hexagonal form with a terraced inner wall. It is a rather obvious crater and supposedly it can be picked up in binoculars although I haven't tried this myself.

My final target of the night was L27 which is the crater Archimedes, a large crater lacking central peak. It is the largest of any crater on the Mare Imbrium and is lacking a ray system. It's interior is devoid of any real features with only a few tiny craters around the rim being notable. An interesting thing to note is that if you look really closely and know where to look you can actually make out L66 which is Hadley Rille located next to the mountain range below Archimedes. I haven't classed myself as having checked this one of the list yet because I like to make sure I have seen everything visually.

Overall, I have loved my first night with the QHY5L-II and look forward to see what else I can image. I seem to be on a loser when it comes to the barlow although someone online suggested I go back to my old 2x barlow and see what I can manage with that as it may work better with the new camera.