Here are some raw shots from last night (15/04/06 from 10:22pm to 10:34pm - according to my camera). All I have done is crop out the image of Jupiter from the larger image to fit the forum guidelines on file sizes. I tried to get some shots of the Europa shadow transit after Jupiter had cleared my rooftop, but the seeing was very poor. Visually it would snap for fractions of a second and then blur again. Therefore it was hard to get a single shot timed right and hence all these shots are pretty poor. There was also some cloud around and during the shadow transit which indicated the upper turbulence.
When the shadow transit of Europa was over the seeing steadied down a bit and the view through the eyepiece had crisp views for a number of seconds, before going blurry and then snapping back to clear. When the blurriness occurred it was difficult to pick out the GRS, when it was crisp it was easy to see festoons and white ovals and detail within the red spot. This is the period that the attached shots are taken from. The seeing was no where near the quality when these shots were taken : http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/s...ead.php?t=9093 , and it was harder to get everything to work together (clear seeing and steady hands).
Later I tried to get Europa's egress and the seeing had deteriorated again and there was significant cloud around. To top that off the batteries ran out in the camera when I finally got a gap in the clouds - so no good shots of Europa next to Jove
Anyway, the details of the 4 attached raw shots (pick of the bunch) are below Scope: 12.5" F6 truss dob - no tracking at all Eyepiece / barlow : 8mm Radian + Shorty Plus 2x (472x) Camera / settings : Canon A40, Macro, no flash, everything else auto point and shoot, maximum optical zoom. Checking the properties of the original files indicates the camera settings of 1/8 of a sec exposure, focal length of 16mm, f-number of 4.8
I have saved the quality of these jpegs @ 95% as they are over the 100Kb size limit at 100%
I used Irfanview with the "890" (3rd Raw image) below to play around with getting more detail out of it. I know nothing about wavelets and deconvolution and a few other terms I have read on this site, so I just went into the "enhance colours" section and reduced the brightness to -37 and increased the contrast to 59. I then sharpened the image once with the built in sharpen tool, and finally I resized it by half (532x504 to 266x252 pixels). I know there are a lot more technical processing that can be done, however I think with these single shots you are limited by what you can 'bring out', though I am open to other suggestions for processing and I wait to be impressed by others.
Kudos to Dave (and Asi) for coming up with the idea and supplying prizes. I have certainly been amazed by what I have done (given the setup), and I am sure there are a heap of other unsuspecting observers that will be equally amazed at what can be achieved with some experimentation and having a go . I will be trying again soon and hopefully things will go a bit smoother and I can capture some moon events with great seeing. Feel free to go crazy with any or all of the 4 raw images - I look forward to learning more.
I'm afraid that my contribution is nowhere near as good as Andrews offering but here it is anyway.
These were taken on Sat. 15th April. My first shadow transit ever.
With poor seeing, about 3 - 3.5, Jupiter was in a virtually constant writhing state. But I could just make out the shadow during moments of steadiness, so I went ahead and started filming anyway. As the night wore on, the seeing improved so that the shadow was a definate black dot in the eyepiece. Image Shadow Transit 2 was taken when the seeing was a bit better. I used my Panasonic NV-DA1 Video Camera, a 12.5 ep with the 2" 2x barlow, optical zoom was used.
All avi's were downloaded to the hard drive via a TV card that only captures at 320x240. These are burned to a CD, then transfered to a faster computer for processing with Registax.
Shadow Transit 2 - 401 frames. Apart from wavelets, of which I only really use the last 3 layers, only a moderate amount of gamma and a touch of contrast was used. Quite a number of relatively good frames, concidering how bad the seeing was at that stage.
Shadow Transit 2 selected frames - 156 frames this time. I spent conciderable time selecting only the very best, thinking that it may improve the results. The only real difference I can notice is some finer detail in the festoons.
Shadow Transit 5 - 217 frames. Once I adjusted wavelets 4, 5 and 6, graininess and onion rings were a real problem. To combat the graininess, I changed layer 1 to -5 which softened the image. Big gamma adjustments cut down the onion ring and really brought out the shadow. I also lightened the contrast a bit too.
If you could have seen the speed wobbles on Jupiter during the Optimize stage of Registax, you would wonder that any sort of image could have been made.
Everyone else, have a go, post your images and ask for help in final processing. That is part of the entry, we Asi & I want to know you have learnt something.
I've been fiddling around with my best shot from the other night, Shadow Transit 2.
This time I used K3CCD Tools to align and stack, then opened the bmp in Registax to adjust wavelets, saturation etc and guess what.......
I GOT COLOUR!!!!
After 4 months of trying, I really feel I've achieved something here.
I've posted the before and after images.
I can't say much about the overall quality of the image, but it's a start.
I'll be spending the rest of today reprocessing every image I've taken this year. What fun!
Jeanette
PS. I just added an over processed image that shows a bit more detail in the GRS.
LMAO! well here it goes!!!
taken 20.4.06 @ aprox 10pm.
seeing:5/10 tops
tranparency: 4-7/10 light patchy clouds
scope: 8" newt. had RA tracking going but with a single exposure i guess it doesnt matter
eyepiece: 7.5mm ultima
camera: sony dsc-p31 2mp. no optical zoom. I set digital zoom to its max to tray and get some image scale and was quite pleased to get banding.
I set up early but didnt head out till after house... hey it was house night!!! i tried various combinations for trying to get image scale and clarity both hand held and with my camera holder thingy and found the barlow didnt give me the clarity i wanted (because of seeing and the fact its a cheapie) so what i ended up with was an non-hand held afocal thru my 7.5, the FOV thru my 6.5 s500 was just too tricky. i snapped many shots thru the night and the following three were the most promising. I was lucky to time it for when Io was transiting and managed to get its shadow, of which i am greatly pleased (god bless CDC). clouds were coming and going all night so i used them to my advatage in the darker one for adding contrast.
camera settings: well theres not alot of scope for change with my camera. ISO set to 100 and the rest is pretty much auto. the only other part i can erally change that is worth changing is image quality so i just set it to its highest.
played with them all in PSP9. brightness lowered, contrast raised a touch, played a little in unsharp mask, and finished with smoothing and resizing (smaller)to get rid of the horrid grainyness (a little bit).
any questions? http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...s/DSC05924.jpg http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...s/DSC05907.jpg http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v4...s/DSC05906.jpg
I've had my 3" wobbletronic for a few months now and had great fun with it. Now its time to see what sort of images I can get from it. If I can get as good as the other images here I will be very impressed.
So for my first attempt at imaging I took a bullet camera and removed the lense, made a quick adaptor from a syringe and shoved it into the ep holder. I found the FOV of the camera to be much small than the ep's I have so I had to get Jupiter exactly in the middle of the FOV before putting the camera in. Focusing the camera also proved difficult, actually I never got a clear image from the camera.
I could get about 20secs of video before Jupiter went out of the FOV. After opening the video in Regisatx and pressing a few buttons at random (I have no idea what to do here I just followed the defaults) I came up with my first astrophotgraph . Attached is a frame grab and the processed image. its no work of art but it is a start. You can't tell from the image but it is Jupiter :-) I'm impressed with the Registax software, very clever stuff.
After some advice from the good folks here I discovered I needed to reduce the exposure time as Jupiter was too bright. Given that the camera has no manual control at all this was not so easy. I ended up masking the scope so the amount of light entering the camera was reduced. This improved things a little but still a long way to go. The result of this is attached. I think you can just make out the bands, maybe with some better processing they would be more visible. I suspect reducing the light entering the scope is not quite the right thing to do.
Next I focused the camera on the moon first before pointing it to Jupiter. I was able to get a good focus on the moon and I could see the effect of the atmosphere wobbling/bluring the image. This also highlighted the need for a well aligned scope as finding Jupiter was not trivial. I haven't processed that image yet.
I also have a webcam which is now in peices and I'm goping to try K3CCDTools software to see what I can do with it. Might have to borrow a laptop from my housemate.
This is fun. I have an excuse to pull apart all my cameras!
Might need to stiffen up this mount too.
Got out again last night and I got some pretty good seeing – perhaps slightly better than the night belonging to my first entry in this comp. The equipment was virtually the same as before (accept for an experiment with my 3x Barlow), however on this occasion I used Registax to do the mods on wavelets and gamma, rather than play with brightness and contrast in Irfanview.
Refresher on equipment:
12.5’ f6 dob, 8mm Radian eyepiece, 2x Shorty Plus Barlow, 3x Televue Barlow, Canon A40 – auto mode accept for selection of macro and no flash and some optical zoom, patience, small step ladder as the planet reached the zenith.
Last night saw a shadow transit and actual transit of Io. The transit of the GRS followed this.
I managed to capture the ingress of Io’s transit across Jove, with its shadow already on the planet. The first three images cover this. The view through the eyepiece was steady for perhaps 60% of the time. The first image shows the raw capture after being cropped and resized a little for input into Registax. I used Irfanview to resample (using Mitchell) the image to a smaller size. If I didn’t do this I found the image was too big to put into Registax and have the ‘processing area’ cover the whole planet. Is there a way to resize the processing area? After “stacking” the single shot, I was at the wavelet tab. Here I selected the wavelet filter to be Gaussian (seemed to give a smoother result (using default value of 0.10?)). I then modified the wavelets to be 1,1,1,9,20,34. I am not sure if this is the best approach, but it seemed to work for me and the little detail in my single shots. I also dragged the gamma line below the curve and that seemed to improve the colours somewhat – not really sure what is the correct colour, but the details seemed to be easier to see. I then saved this image and that appears as the second image. Thirdly I resized the image down to 50% as this seems to hide some of the pixilation created from the wavelet adjustments. I found the B-spline option gave the smoothest and most pleasing result.
I took several other (read couple of hundred) shots as the night wore on. I used the same processing for the other images attached here as described above.
Later while experimenting with my 3x TV Barlow (giving ~708x!!) I could hold a reasonable view so I decided to give this a go with the camera. What I noticed straight away was the “goobies” on my eyepiece and possibly the Barlow were very pronounced. Maybe it was because of the high power, or maybe it was harder for the camera to auto-focus on the blurrier planet than the image created by the goobies. I did manage a shot at this power that showed Io’s shadow leaving Jupiter’s disk while the GRS was rounding the opposite limb. The idea behind this was to get as many pixels into the details. The view through the eyepiece indicated it was possible, unfortunately most of the raw images showed otherwise. I have attached the pick of the bunch here (resized raw and reprocessed resized final and it did come out OK – in that you can see Io’s shadow and the GRS (remember to squint! )
After going back to the 2x Barlow I got a few shots of the GRS coming around and I have attached the raw and processed-resized images of one of the better ones (sometimes it is hard to pick which is the better one as they often show slightly different detail).
Finally I have attached the processed image of perhaps my best (read clearest and steadiest) shot. Unfortunately the slight delay in clicking and capture meant it was leaving the field of view of the camera at the time - wish I had of got that a second or two earlier
The quality of the images don’t necessarily indicate changes in seeing as the largest component of variability is my ability to hold the camera steady enough to capture the shot – of course the seeing has to be OK otherwise my steady shots would look the same as the unsteady ones .
Of course being the visual observer that I am, and having the conditions that I had, it was a constant battle to remove my eyeball from the eyepiece and hold the camera up to it. One final comment is that this sort of imaging gets more difficult when your on a step ladder moving the dob near the ‘dob-hole’
Thanks for looking. If anyone wants the originals to play with, just PM me, otherwise feel free to grab the ones attached here and have a play. Any advise on Registax settings would be greatly appreciated.
Ok here is the processed image when I focused on the moon first. ummm WOW! this software is really impressive. I think the better detail here is due to better process rather than better focus. I'll have to have another go at processing the previous images to be sure.
I've got the webcam ready just need to borrow a laptop...stay tuned
More offerings from Wednesday nights transit.
I used the same setup as usual. The seeing was around 3, with some high cloud.
I experimented with the White Balance settings on the camera, these pics were taken on "Interior Lighting". The "Bright and Sunny" setting was too blue, and wouldn't allow any red to come out.
Processing with K3CCD Tools for some reason didn't work well, so I stacked with Registax instead.
I used the RGB Shift in Registax, but it only works to a certain point. I seem to be picking up more chromatic aberation ( is that the right term) than usual lately. I wonder if it has to do with the fact that Jup is so bright?
Final tweaking was done with the freebie program that came with my old Polaroid digital, "Photo Impression 2000". Adjustments in midtone, highlights and shadow, saturation, contrast and sharpen were used.
Image 18 is my favourite but I also like the darker pics because you see more detail.
The best raw frames from each is posted.
2.62 gig over 34 avi's. Just to get 4 pics of any sort of worth. Is this the usual ratio of success vs flops?
Ok, so the last image I posted was way too dark. Here it is straight from Registax with only wavelets and one of the same with some extra processing.
I can see that the contrast and brightness on ones computer monitor can effect the final result. One more thing to watch out for.
Ok here is my latest effort, still improving slightly.
This was taken very quickly as the clouds rushed past. I got about 16 secs of video which gave me 675 frames to play with in Registax. I used the bullet camera with the 3x barlow with a partial lense cap on to reduce the over exposure on the image (I can't change the exposure/frame rate/etc on this camera). Processed it in Registax using wavelets 6/5/4/3 with values of 50/24/12/4. I played around with reference frames but that seemed to make things worse.
Not sure what the seeing was like, the view was better than the other day when I guessed seeing was 2 or 3 but I think that is a result of collimating the scope. The quick star test showed a circular diffraction pattern that was previously a rounded triangle...things are improving. Transparency was woeful with jupiter only showing for very brief periods.
Given the frame grab and the final processed image do you think I could do better with the processing or should I concentrate on getting better raw footage?
I managed to get out on the weekend to catch some of the Europa transit on Saturday night. When I set the scope up for cooling there was no sign of any cloud - just a lot of gusty wind. By the time Jupiter had cleared the house the sky was covered by clumpy cloud. I managed to get off a few shots of the shadow transit in the sucker holes, but the seeing was naturally quite ordinary. Of course the skies cleared up after the shadow and GRS transits. Equipment was the usual 12.5" dob, 8mm Radian, 2x barlow and Canon A40 2Mp camera.
The seeing was way more variable than the previous times. This made it more difficult to get any sort of detail out of the handheld single shots undertaken. I have cropped and processed the better ones here. Processing, like the pervious entry, involved tweaking the 4th, 5th, and 6th wavelet sliders and the gamma curve until what little detail in the images was enhanced. I played a bit with the sliders for these shots so there is no consistency in the numbers between each one, accept for the fact that there was an increase in the value going from 4 to 6 for the wavelets and the gamma curve was always below the 1:1 line.
I think varying the wavelet sliders for the different shots was needed as the variability in the seeing was so high, and the detail quite variable. I also noticed the colours weren't as vivid as my previous entries which could have been something to do with the conditions (as I was shooting in sucker holes and there may have still been some thin cloud there).
anyway a few raw cropped captures and corresponding processed and resized images appear below. There are hints of Red Spot Jr in a few (and I do mean hints - remember to squint ) and the last image shows Europa in the upper right hand side of the planet as the bright spot about to emerge.
I seem to be the only non-digital photographer left! I am using my 1984 Minolta S300 SLR for now although I will eventually get a webcam. These are my first through the telescope shots ever. They didn't turn out too well but I thought I'd put them up to see if anyone can tell me what to work on.
The shots here are all afocal with camera on a tripod. I used a 2x barlow and 9mm GSO plossl on my bintel 150mm eq newtonian (167x). The exposures are 1/8", 1/4" and 1/2" respectively. I used 400 colour print kodak film. The first 3 are the cropped raw images. The last 3 pictures are the reprocessed versions using microsoft picture manager by minimising the brightness and maximising the contrast. (I went through a whole film at different exposures and also at x100. These were the best.)
I don't really know how to estimate seeing but I'll guess about 4/10 - Jupiter was not that high (30 degrees?) and it was from my backyard in light polluted, humid Wollongong. I took the photos on 18 April at aroud 9-10pm.
Any advice? I'm planning to try:
* Trying harder on focusing. I wear glasses and focusing through the camera screen was difficult - maybe I should try a hartman mask?
* The Covington book says that photo labs often get contrast etc wrong on astrophotos and recommends scanning the negatives and then digitially reversing and enhancing. I actually have a scanner that is supposed to be able to scan negatives although I've never tried this.
* The same book suggested slide film rather than print film so I'll try this too.
The beginners imaging contest is a great idea. I had been planning to try photography through the scope for a while and this got me motivated to actually do something - thanks to the organisers.
its amazing how bad seeing makes bad pics even badder...
date/time: 23.4.06 @ 9:30(ish)
seeing: 4-5/10 (went down to 1 at times but not often)
transparency: 8/10 between clouds
scope/EP: 8" newt + 6.5mm s500
camera/settings: sony dsc-p31 2mp. iso 100, digital zoom 2x (max), all other settings auto.
i set up early, had dinner and watched a bit of idiotbox (tv) then went out to see what was to be. what was to be was bad seeing.
anyhow i snapped off about 20 shots and went to the puter to process them. I ditched 8 of them as they showed no detail at all and "optimised", manually aligned them. i then played with wavelets and found that any move in the positive direction made the already pixilated image worse. some movements in the negative smoothed the image out. contrast and brightness altered, resized to 50% to reduce the pixilated effect a bit and whamo!
This is the last entry I'll be submitting. We're away till Monday night.
The pictures were taken on the 26th of April, capturing the ingress of Io's shadow transit. Seeing was approx. 3.5 out of 5.
Image 2 is the best, with 414 frames stacked. Wavelet settings 4) 10.5
5) 14.5 6) 21.2. Gamma adjustment and RGB shift were used. I've posted the best raw frame, 19.
The other images have been worked over once, picking and choosing only the best frames and setting the quality in Registax to 95%. The reason for their graininess is the low number of frames in each avi.
6. 106 frames
9. 98 frames
11. 117 frames
12. 39 frames
15. 306 frames
I've given up trying for colour instead I'm aiming for good grey scale images.
This is one of my very first astrophotography attempts, i got my scope on monday. Im not to sure about all the info - so if that disqualifies me - bad luck for me. I read about this contest before i got my scope and only thought to submit this after id processed it so i didnt think to record every step. Scope: 1200mm focal length 200mm apeture dobsonian - no tracking. Seeing: as i said im really new and dont really know the best seeing, but there were no clouds and the stars were twinkling a little. I was in my backyard, so there was a lot of light pollution, and i wasnt very high. eyepiece: 10mm super plossl - no barlow camera: "Nikon Coolpix L-1" on video mode (cant tell you focus - exposure settings because i dont know them) maximum optical zoom (not sure what that is i cant find the box and it doesnt say on the camera) Date/Time: 27/4/06 not completely sure of time, but i think it was 7:30ish Pic: taken from a few seconds of footage - im not sure houw to upload the movie so if you want it youll have to tell me how i can give it to you. http://img142.imageshack.us/img142/6800/1stjup6tj.png
thats from the 29 useful frames i had of the footage before it started to leave the FOV. Unprocessed frame: http://img99.imageshack.us/img99/518/jupiter123dq.jpg Processing process:
I had to convert the video from .mov to .avi for use with Vdub so i used "RAD video tools" (found with googling)
I then used vdub to change the avi into a series of .bmp images.
ppmcentre was used to get 400x400 planet centred .bmps and then registax was used to do its thing. Im not too familiar with registax and just used the rgbshift feature and fiddled with the wavelet layers until it got the best pic - im not sure of individual layer settings.
Edit: I also used registax to flip it on the x and y axis so its "true" ie not inverted from the OTA
thru the EP (7.5) jupiter swam lazily . the 2 main bands were showing and that was about it, no detail in the bands at all. worst seeing I have wittnessed... well i have seen worse but i wasnt looking at a planet at the time so it didnt matter so much.
Still, i was set up so i decided to snap a few shots. I got rid of most of them cause they didnt even show the bands and after a bit of processing in psp with unsharp mask, bightness contrast, edge preserving smooth and a bit of rgb mixer came up with this measley effort....
Bah!
also whacked in the 15mm and snapped off this pic of the jewelbox cluster just for fun before i headed in....
. I will be trying again soon and hopefully things will go a bit smoother and I can capture some moon events with great seeing. Feel free to go crazy with any or all of the 4 raw images - I look forward to learning more.
One more thing to watch out for.
seeing is everything
