Mars, 25/08 in good seeing

[iceman (Mike)]

Hey guys.

Finally had some decent seeing (first time in months) with the Jetstream vacant over Sydney area, and took the opportunity to get up early and image Mars and the moon.

I haven't processed the moon avi's yet, but here are my Mars efforts.

Things went fairly well, aligning was much quicker this time and I was capturing avi's within 10-15 minutes of walking outside at 3:30am. I'm still struggling with the capture settings to eliminate the bright limb that occurs during processing.. I can process it softly to reduce it, but I prefer to bring out the detail, and pushing the wavelets too hard is when the bright limb comes out.

Anyway here's a selection of the best from this morning, I'm quite pleased with them and even the resampled (upsized) ones turned out quite good. I wish I had that image scale all the time!

Appreciate comments and feedback.

[h0ughy (David)]

Very Nice work there Mike.

[rumples riot]

Great image, very clear and this is the best image I have seen this year in Australia. What barlow were you using? I used my 2.5 powermate for my imaging session and the scale of yours is a lot bigger. Did you resample?

Anyway, great image I would be very happy with an image like this. Exceptional seeing makes the difference.

Keep em coming.

[rumples riot]

Sorry, just looked again, yes you did resample, forget that question.

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

Excellent Mike. Impressive. Any chance of including a few more capture settings and processing details to save us, well this, slacko a bit of time going through the trial and error process. I'm looking forward to when its viewable at a more reasonable hour. Like 1:30. 3:30 is just too long to stay up on a workday night

[ving (David)]

i am with paul... I want it up at 9pm. that way cheryl doesnt complain and work doesnt suffer too much

v/nice image mike

[Dennis]

Great images Mike, with impressive details and processing skills.

Cheers

Dennis

[RB (Andrew)]

Fantastic Mike.

Keep 'em coming........

[gbeal]

Wow Mike, very nice. Good seeing is the key I guess, but the rest all look good as well, focus, tracking etc. Well done.

[Striker (Tony)]

Awesome stuff Mike....you sure you havn't kidnaped Bird and using his pictures....lol

[asimov (John)]

Very nice Mike!

[iceman (Mike)]

Thanks guys for all the nice comments.

What barlow were you using? I used my 2.5 powermate for my imaging session and the scale of yours is a lot bigger. Did you resample?

I used a 3x antares barlow for the top (smaller) images. The 3 at the bottom were resampled as a last thought, and they turned out much nicer than I expected!

Any chance of including a few more capture settings and processing details

Sorry Paul, forgot to include the details.
5fps
1/33s exposure
between 10-20% gain (to get the histogram around 200)
gamma 0
brightness default (50%)
Captured for 180 seconds (approx 900 frames @ fps)

Processing involved:
- Loading the avi in virtualdub to weed out any obviously bad frames and save as individual bmp files
- Run the bmp files through "ppmcentre" to crop them to 400x400 and centre the planet in the frame
- Load the bmp's in registax, choose "gradient", do initial alignment.
- Choose the far left frame (the sharpest) and choose "align" again.
- Move the slider to where it starts peaking up and press "Limit"
- Create reference frame (default values), move wavelet 3 to about 4-5, press "continue"
- Press "Optimise"
- On stack tab, on the stackgraph drag vertical slider down to stack about 1/4 to 1/3 of the total frames
- Go to wavelets, RGB align, Estimate
- Move wavelets 6-3 in that order, not too much with Mars otherwise the bright limb appears.
- Save as TIF
- Load the TIF in AstraImage, split into colour planes
- Do a LR deconvolution on each R G B frame with values 3 iterations, 1.3 as the value
- Combine the RGB back into a single image (RGB combine)
- Unsharp mask (medium, strength 1.2-1.8)
- Screenshot
- Paste in Photoshop, crop and save

Hope that helps.

Thanks again!

[Orion]

Mike,you realy do some nice work on the planets. Well done.

[davidpretorius]

me want a barlow, fathers days someone reckons in another thread!!!

nice work mike!

[acropolite (Phil)]

Excellent work Mike, a lot better than one I've seen recently posted in mags send them in to S&T

[beren]

Fantastic Mike well done , been checking the CN images and yours rival the best so far , you really do have talent at this discipline

[iceman (Mike)]

Thanks guys, you're too kind

Seeing is the single biggest limiting factor to getting good images, I hope to have a few more days with good seeing in the near future (oh, and a 5x powermate might be nice too).

My wife keeps asking me what I want for fathers day.. a AU$310 5x powermate would be nice but I don't think it will go down too well

Oh and if anyone else would like a go at processing an image, here's my raw avi. It's approx 5.5 meg to download, but uncompresses to 440meg so just beware

Download here

It's compresses using winrar (similar to winzip) if your O/S doesn't recognise the filetype.

[davidpretorius]

cmon mike, Work it work it work it.

I recommend taking out a note book and watching "Hitch" with Will Smith. Your wife will know she is getting conned, but she will love the efforts!!!

It is for the very best you know! A 5x, you really want it, you really need it!!!

[Rodstar (Rod)]

Mike, you are full of surprises. Lovely composite of images. I'm looking forward to your shots from 30 October, when Mars reaches maximum.