I haven't posted for a while and its good to be back on IIS!
So far, I have have focused my astrophotography on the Moon (using mono CCD and CMOS cameras). However, in other to get more into planetary imaging I recently acquired a filterwheel and a set of RGB filters.
Mars is the first planet I have managed to image in RGB. The result is passable considering that the seeing wasn't very good. However, I am not very happy with the colour (compared to what I usually see on IIS). I have reworked the images several times, but I don't seem to be able to improve the colour which has a green tinge to it (the poles are greenish too). What am I doing wrong?
Here is how I went about it:
Equipment: Sky Watcher 10" on AZ EQ6, Zwo ASI120MM, TV Powermate x5, Zwo RGB filters and filterwheel.
- Capture: 2500 frames in each colour
- AVI cropping and centering in castrator
- Registering and stacking in Autostakkert 2
- Deconvolution and light sharpening in Astra Image
- Colorify, layering (RGB combination) and colour level adjustments in GIMP
I also have a few questions:
Should I capture the same amount of frames per filter or should each filter have a different frame ratio?
Are the layers misaligned in the final picture? (it seems to me that there are)
Is there a better RGB combination routine than the one I use (ie by using a more appropriate software than GIMP)?
Could the problem be with the filters?
Could you point me to a good tutorial on how to combine RGB images for planetary imaging?
I would be very grateful for your comments. Please be critical, I need to learn!
I can't answer any of your questions, since I use a DSLR, but your Mars doesn't look too bad to me.
You could try using RGB Align in Registax wavelets with the combined image to see if that does anything - you don't necessarily have to do anything else with it. I don't know if GIMP has an alignment feature.
Last edited by Astro_Bot; 24-05-2014 at 09:45 AM.
Reason: Spelling