Mars and Saturn, from Son, Norway

[oernulfs]

Saturn at about 11 degrees altitude, and Mars at about 24 degrees.

Shot through my C9.25 with a dbk 21 color cam using a 2,5x powermate and a 3x barlow (from televue).

It's damn difficult to get those planets sharp :mad2:

[Astro_Bot]

Yes, it is. ;) But at those low elevations, your efforts are looking pretty good. My rough guess is that you could get more with processing. What programs are you using to stack and sharpen?

Also, your image scale looks a little small given focal length of 3 x 2.5 x 2350mm - it should be larger than my shots, even allowing for pixel width on the sensor, but looks smaller. :confused2:

[oernulfs]

I use AS!2 for stacking and Registax 6. I haven't applied any other processing.

Hints on processing is recieved with gratitude :)

About image scale: I have used 2,5x and 3x separately!!! Sorry for any misunderstanding on this point :P

[Astro_Bot]

Well, that's what I would have suggested, so not much else to say except to try different parameters in those programs and compare the results.

FWIW, on Mars at a focal length of 12.5m, I stack between 5% and 10% of around 3000-4000 frames. With your high-speed camera, you should have no trouble getting, say, 5000-8000 frames with less rotation, so, theoretically, better results.

For sharpening with wavelets in Registax: experiment! There are tutorials on using Registax, but I found the parameters that work best for me depend so much on the nature of the data (image scale, seeing, target nature), that it's hard to give direct advice. Just remember that the layers go from fine to coarse (which is necessary otherwise you'd end up sharpening ever increasing amounts of noise). For example, if you sharpen the fine layer, and can see more real detail, but it also produces a "mottled" texture, then you need to increase the denoising at that layer.

For post-processing, I use GIMP, but the tools in Registax are probably good enough - RGB Balance, Flip & Rotate, Gamma, Histogram, Contrast/Brightness, etc.


Cool. What's the current exchange rate between Gratitude and the Australian Dollar? :)