First Jupiter and Saturn

[Atmos]

I've never attempted to do planetary photography other than just some happy snaps on my older iPhone hovering over the eye piece. So, I knew that my image scale was off, especially for OSC but I figured I'd give it a go anyway. I had been photographing Messier 8 and it was coming to the end of its run so I thought as a filter before moving on to NGC 300 I'd give a go at some planetary.

Equipment:
Mewlon 250 F/10
ASI094

I do have a QHY183M which is a good match but I wasn't going to go through all of the hassle of changing things over for a quick foray.

Jupiter had 3000 frames at 10ms
Saturn had 3000 frames at 15ms

I know Saturn rotates slower than Jupiter so I'm hoping that I'm not pushing the rotation time out too far.
I'm wanting to play around with drizzle integrating in AS!3 to see if it helps.

[Atmos]

I ran both 1.5x and 3x drizzle integration on Saturn as it looked like it was the one that would benefit most from it. Appears to help a bit with the jagged edges. This added one is 1.5x, I found the 3x just wasn't good at all.

I have two SER files of Jupiter and only the 1 of Saturn so I'll have to do some more playing around. I've not put any care into the wavelet sharpening in RegiStax, I am just fumbling around and hoping for the best :lol:

[multiweb]

That's looking really good Colin. I need to get a color cam. :)
Interesting you find drizzle integration to improve the final. I never tried as I thought the image scale is already pretty big but I will now. On Saturn I always get "stairs" on the bright side of the planet where it meets the rings. Pretty sure that's a side effect of my processing too when I sharpen too much trying to get details on the surface.

[Atmos]

Thanks Marc. My image scale is at 0.4"/pixel at the moment, I should be closer to 0.17"/pixel to do better with planetary details.
Here is a 40% stack of the second Jupiter set. Did a 1.5x drizzle, a little less harsh on the wavelets and did some mild deconvolution to recover some lost details. One night I should connect the QHY183M to the Mewlon and just do some planetary and lunar imaging.... But then I miss out on Deep Space! Oh the First World Problems!

[Camelopardalis]

Good first images Colin :thumbsup: just needs a bit more focal length!

[Tulloch]

Nice images Colin, remember you can capture Jupiter for 3 minutes and Saturn for 5 minutes without any problems with rotational smearing. AS!3 does a great job in aligning the pixels that might be shifted slightly, even on my alt/az scope that also adds field rotation.

For instance, I capture around 27000 frames for Jupiter (180sec x 150fps) and 30000 for Saturn (300sec x 100fps) and stack about 5000 of each for the final image.

I always use 3x drizzle in AS!3, just to make the images bigger so I can see the effects of sharpening and noise reduction easier - if you can get them to look good at 3x captured size, they always look a lot better when reduced down to captured size :).

Finding good settings in Registax is the part I have the most difficulty with. Nowadays, once I find a good setting, I save it and use again as a start point for the next session.

Andrew

[Anth10]

They are both very good images Colin- this should give you incentive to further your skills in planetary imaging - a great first up effort,
Well done/
Of course seeing is king in this game.

Anth.