Ice Giants 6th November

[Sebbie]

G'day all,

Had three nights of reasonable seeing last week which presented a good opportunity for high power Neptune and Uranus imaging. I've only processed two avis so far, both captured at f40 (via a combination of two 2x Barlows - Meade + TV). I am still to master colour calibration (white balancing) at acquisition time.. so it took quite a while to get the hues right in post processing.

Ended up stacking 324 frames for Neptune (@ 1 sec exposure) in Registax and 396 for Uranus (@ 0.6 sec) in AS!2. Final image enlarged 1.5x. Focusing was the hardest thing to get right during this attempt so I'm not sure if hints of detail are on show here or just more processing artefacts.. ACDSee & Astra Image used for noise reduction and wavelet sharpening.

I'm including a photo montage of raw and stacked images for reference. I'd appreciate everyone's comments/suggestions :)

Cheers,
Seb

[Poita]

Great stuff. And thanks *so* much for posting the RAW images, it really helps!

[brian nordstrom]

:) Thanks Seb , great image's these are so small and very hard to capture you have done very well .
Brian.

[John Hothersall]

Splendid results showing these distant planets.

John.

[Sebbie]

Thanks Peter - I agree comparing raw shots is helpful, particularly on challenging targets such as these.. As mentioned I haven't bothered to adjust tone curves in IC Capture beforehand (and I don't know how successful that would be on Neptune given how dim it is - looks greyish upon debayering here)



Thanks Brian, getting the image centred on camera chip required multiple attempts at this power (patience was the key here :lol:). After that trying to keep the object within the field of view during capture (I took multiple 20 minute clips on Neptune :screwy:)



Thanks for words of praise John. I'm yet to process long exposure satellite attempts but preliminary stacks are not very encouraging thus far.

[PacoYepes]

Good work

regards