My best Jupiter so far

[cometcatcher]

I'm a deep sky imager, not a planet imager. But I want to learn the dark art of planetary imaging. Funds are pretty limited at the moment so have to use the equipment that I've got, which at F4 is not really the greatest for planets! I also don't have the correct adapters so I'm just holding the camera to the eyepiece. I have an eyepiece projection adapter tube coming so hopefully with that I can improve.

So this is where I'm at. GSO 10" F4 Newtonian, HEQ5 Pro, 675 frames stacked in Registax, eyepiece projection from a Televu 7.5mm eyepiece, Pentax K-5 handheld.

[raymo]

Good start Kevin; why not use your 90mm Mak? that's what it does best.
raymo

[PKay]

Hi Kevin.
Your Jupiter is very good, way better than most of us can achieve.
From my limited experience planetary imaging is all about seeing conditions, but I'm sure you know that.
Well done :thumbsup:

[Mickoid]

As one who tends to post planetary shots on this site quite regularly, I think you have done extremely well to achieve this result afocally. It's certainly no easy task to keep the camera lens centred to the eyepiece by hand, so well done for that alone. Adding to this, your processing has revealed some nice colours and detail. A+ from me!

[cometcatcher]

Thanks Ray. The 90mm Mak is 1000mm FL. The 10" F4 is also 1000mm FL, along with all the other advantages of larger aperture. The optics of the 10" are also very good. Larger Mak Cas' are certainly excellent, but the 4" is a bit small to compete.



Thanks Peter. Yes seeing was quite good last night and Jupiter was at the zenith, seeing through less mirkosphere. Deep sky is best at the zenith too.



Thanks Michael! I drool over your planetary images. Not sure why you post in the beginner section?

I had to hold my breath while taking the video sequences lol, much like distance target shooting. Take a half breath, hold it, hold it! Can't wait to get the adapter tube. I can breathe again.

I'm quite pleased with the video using the K-5, but I am also looking at a planet cam and wondering which one is the best. Probably be a ZWO something.

[rustigsmed]

nice one kevin - some good detail there!

[cometcatcher]

Thanks Russell! Something to do while the Moon is in the sky.

[AndyG]

Kevin,

Your achievement has inspired me to give this a bash!


I'd never touched a stacker program before last night. So out came the gear for an attempt (not ideal, but it's what I've got):
C6 on Nextar mount, Nikon D800, 2x Barlow, and Registax. I took 1 min for video with the DSLR - 1080P @ 30FPS.



As you can see, I have a lot to learn! At least the conditions here are perfect, so there's no excuse not to keep at it. This is my 5th astro pic ever, to have survived the recycle bin :p

[cometcatcher]

That's very good Andy! Can see lots of detail there. I'm glad to have inspired someone.

[sil]

Great shots guys, don't throw away your source files. I suspect you can get better with the same data. Take a look at using PIPP to process to BMP frames or a SER video, using Center Object and crop to about 500px or less (if you dont mind losing moons). Run your captued data through PIPP, it probably doesnt do raw files and dont know about dslr videos (I use with ser files from FireCapture) but if you can convert what you have to uncompressed TIFFS it'll take those. This will give you a bunch of uncompressed frames with the planet centered (aligned basically), there are options for quality reordering and keeping only the best X% frames you can play with. Hand held recording at eyepiece you will move around so this should let you retain the best of the data (no smeared planets as you move your camera from side to side). The output files from this are aligned so you can run in registax immediately and at the end the Re-Align button becomes active and if you run that you can get even better results.

However I suggest grabbing AutoStakkert instead of registax. Dump the files from PIPP into AutoStakkert and it'll do its own wavelet (I think) sharpening and levels adjusting. I suspect both Kevin and Andy will get much better results using the data they captured already. I absolutely hate wavelets in registax, they confuse the hell out of me, And I've done some testing in the past with registax, PixInsight and Autostakkert on planetary and found my best efforts in PixInsight were hard to pick from the automatic sharpening of AutoStakkert (and its only a checkbox to turn on, simple!). So I trust all my planetary, solar/lunar surface data to AutoStakkert now.

Both PIPP and AutoStakkert are 100% free so give them a go guys! Much easier than RegiStax too. And don't forget Saturn and Mars in our skies now too, nice and bright. At least a bright moon isn't much of a problem for planetary imagers so get out there guys!

[cometcatcher]

Thanks for the tips Sil! I need all the advice I can get. I'll give pipp and autostakkert a go. I used to use registax a lot, but I don't like version 6. The wavelets make no sense to me either.

[AndyG]

That's terrific advice Sil, thankyou for taking the time to share that. I'm lucky in planetary shots that my Nextar SE is not really a shortfall, compared to the long exposure times I could never get without an EQ mount. I can work with what I have and improve the "method" portion of the task, thanks to good advice.


Registax6 in all honesty was incredibly unstable on my PC. I didn't however see an opportunity for DSS to ingest video. I'm sure Autostakkert will help :)


Cheers, Andy.