Jupiter from Murrumbateman, May

[bird]

had some nice seeing this morning, spoiled a bit by persistent jetstream blurring, but some good results from some periods.

regards, Bird

[Craig.a.c]

Love seeing nice pics of jupiter. The various cloud bands blow me away every time.

[Robert_T]

Hi Bird, that's a spectacular shot, lovely smooth detail and an image scale that makes me weep! This is the colour I'm looking for too but which can never quite pull...light caremally browns. Any tips to get this?

cheers,

Rob

[John K]

Beautifull Anthony. Was wondering when you would post next!

We got wiped out with high cloud this morning in Melbourne despite good seeing until midnight.

[Lester]

Very pleasing to the eyes, Anthony.

Just look at those orange storms and the detail.

[bird]

Not really sure Rob - here's what I do, maybe some of this will be useful info...

- leave gamma set to "neutral", ie don't artificially darken the image while capturing as that loses information.

- capture lots of frames (I guess this is only useful for people with mono cameras and reasonable amounts of aperture on Jupiter). For this image I used:

60 seconds of R @ 40fps
60 seconds of G @ 45fps
60 seconds of B @ 35fps

With the Astronomik RGB filter set.

And I stacked the best 1500 frames from each set (as given by the -qestimator -qrenumber option in ninox). If you're feeling brave you can rely on Registax to find the best images instead but that never works properly for me :-)

In registax, use multipoint alignment and about 4 or 5 alignment points

- be gentle on wavelets after stacking, enhance only the fine details. Don't worry too much of some noise comes up as this will be removed later during deconvolution and smoothing.

- Load the result into Astra Image, deconvolve (this part is trial and error, the best settings wil depend completely on the mix of low and high frequency info in your image as well as how much noise is present).

- When you've done this for each of R,G,B, use the Astra Image recombine function to get a colour image

- save as a colour TIFF, load into the Gimp (you may use photoshop) and apply some selective blurring to reduce noise and selective unsharp masking to enhance detail, set levels, colour balance etc. Basically this last stage is where all the destructive things get done.

Some judgement is needed to decide where the line falls between small details and noise, basically you want to smooth everything below this line (noise) and enhance everything above the line (details). It takes some trial and error to find the right set of tools for the job.

As for the colour, I generally find the only change needed is to add some blue. I think the Astronomik filters have good colour balance built-in.

cheers, Bird

[Robert_T]

Thanks Bird, something that stood out for me is the number of frames your stacking. I'm doing 60 sec at 30fps giving around 1800 frames but only stacking about the best 200 per channel. 1500 is an awful lot, I'll try more and see how I go. Thanks for the very informative reply Bird. Ta, Rob

[bird]

oops, forgot to take my own advice... the original image had no gamma adjustment in the final step, fixed now :-)

cheers, Bird

[bird]

No problems, I reckon you can go 60 seconds, and (if the seeing is good) stack about half the total number of frames.

There are some sessions where I stack 75% of the frames if the seeing is very good, more frames = lower noise, and you can recover the fine details with wavelets/deconvolution/sharpening.

cheers, Bird

[IanL]

Very nice Bird. Gees thats a great shot. That some planet killer of a telescope you got.

Ian

[matt]

That's another great shot, Anthony.

This really is shaping as a very nice apparition for you. You're firing on all cylinders:thumbsup:

[davidpretorius]

another rippa bird!

well done

[bird]

Thanks guys, here's an image from a little earlier, seeing not quite as good but still nice.

cheers,Bird

[matt]

Fantastic!:thumbsup:

Terrific detail in and around the GRS.

The rippling through the SEB is very clear.

[iceman]

Beautiful, beautiful images mr Wesley.

Handy tips and advice, too :thumbsup:

[Dennis]

Hi Anthony,

Very, very impressive images; the detail is quite extraordinary. Top job!

Cheers

Dennis

[bird]

edit: replaced original (top) image. was too heavy on processing in the first version.

cheers, Bird

[Garyh]

That is just beautiful Bird..
Glad you have been getting some better seeing :thumbsup:

[Starkler]

Awesome image Anthony :cheers:

[Matty P]

Absolutely amazing images Anthony!

Amazing!

[John K]

Hi Anthony,

if you don't mind me asking, do you re-focus between filter changes with the Astronomic filters? and if so which way - in or out of focus? Is there a noticable difference?

Lastly, at those FPS settings, do you find the need to underexpose the histogram?

[bird]

John, the focus changes seem to always be in the same direction - with red focussing further in than blue. The difference can be as much as 0.05mm, enough to be noticeable.

It seems to change through the night, I normally find tat all 3 channels are very close together when the scope is pointing straight up, so I suspect there's some dispersion effect.

And yes, I normally under expose the histograms by a long way, my system is to grab lots of frames at short exposures and as long as the frames are around 50% on the histogram then I'm ok. I know other people don't agree with this, but to get a full histogram would require too long an exposure (in my opinion) and blur the frames too much.

cheers, Bird

[edwardsdj]

Another incredible Jupiter Bird :)

The image scale you are able to achieve always blows me away.

[bird]

9th May - probably the best seeing so far this year. This first image is not from the best of the seeing, but it's nice anyway.

regards, Bird

[Lester]

Very nice Anthony.

Like the intricate colour variations in the SEB and so smooth.

[iceman]

Lovely work, Anthony! Beautiful colours. Can't wait to see the better ones!

[bird]

Image #2, I took a bit more care with this one for colour balance and brightness...

cheers, Bird

[bird]

One more... last one for the time being...

cheers, Bird

[edwardsdj]

These images are awesome.

You are the master Brid :)

[Garyh]

Awesome Bird! :thumbsup:
I wanted to have a go at Jup this morning as the seeing looked really nice but I was too buggered from all my DS imaging :)

[bird]

Two more images from this morning... seeing was good, spoiled only by a thick fog that cost me about 50% of the transparency for the second image.

cheers, Bird

[davidpretorius]

you are having a cracking year bird......lotsa fun sharing it with you over messenger this morning :D

[iceman]

Another couple of beauties, Anthony.

Those new filters look very tempting!

[edwardsdj]

Amazing you were able to capture so much through the fog Bird.

These images are amazing as always.

[Ric]

A wonderful set of details Anthony, very clear and detailed

Very fine work indeed.

Cheers

[bird]

Images from this morning (14th May)

well, only one image, the conditions were good for a while but then fell away so there's only one image from this session.

But it's a nice image :-)

regards, Bird

edit: added a smaller version with different processing, depending on your monitor this may look better.

[John K]

Beautifull!

[Satchmo]

Jaw dropping ... beautiful and natural looking colour saturation.

[matt]

Hi Anthony.

More great images!

Are you using new filters?

Sorry if you've already mentioned/ provided details of this somewhere else:)

[bird]

Matt, yes I switched to the astrodon filters on Monday, gives me noticeably brighter images in red and blue. Also the filter cutoffs are much better with no overlap so the colour should be better as well.

cheers, Bird

[edwardsdj]

Yet more great images from the 14th Bird :)

Your images are so incredibly detailed. The second one looks better on my monitor.