Saturn this morning, 15/12/2005

[iceman]

Hi guys.

Had the scope out all night cooling, and when I got up at 3:15am the sky was clear (yay), the air was crisp and everything was wet. But 1 look through the eyepiece, and I could tell the seeing was very good.

Here's my results of the mornings effort. The 3 images are from 3 separate avi's, each of them processed in an almost identical way.

That is:
Virtual dub - save as individual bmp frames
ppmcentre - crop to 400x400 and centre the planet
Registax - stack, RGB align and wavelets
AstraImage - ME deconvolution
Photoshop - composite (no other processing)

The transparency wasn't great thanks to a very bright moon and a few high clouds coming and going, but it was better than last time and I could reduce the gain to about 50%.

I also captured these @ 5fps and 1/25s, meaning the white level went higher without increasing the gain.

The first image is 300 frames stacked, the other 2 are about 800-1000 frames stacked.

The last image, I reduced gain even more, but as a result each frame was quite dark and the histo stretch and processing introduced a few artifacts.

I'm happy with these images, I think they're probably my best of Saturn so far. The capture parameters are such a fine balancing act, but Seeing is king!

Comments welcome.

[ving]

looks good mike :D
the top one looks best. the encke is quite present in them as far as i can see :)

[bird]

Great images Mike, the last one looks the best to my eyes, a little sharper than the others. Stacking more frames, even if they are dimmer seems to give a better result.

regards, Bird

[RB]

Mate even the thumbnails are your best yet. :lol:

These have fantastic colour Mike and detail is terrific too.
And ofcourse the way you've presented them is much more pleasing to the eye.

Well done.

When I got home last night I knew you'd bag a great set of images.
I decided to get out the little scope too and had a go at the moon.

:shrug:

Couldn't resist.

[Robert_T]

hard to pick between 'em but I like the smoothness and sharpness of the bottom one even though perhaps the banding detail is less pronounced - in any canse they are all ****** excellent!:P

[h0ughy]

lets see, i left your place a bit before 10.20, I don't know when the others left, and you were up at 3, did you bother to go back to bed or straight to work? Nice effort for the lack of sleep!

[davidpretorius]

well done mike, #3 for me on my laptop screen

they are top rate!!!

I took 2400 frames (8 mins) in raw mode last night of mars at 1/100 and 15% gain and 1/500 and 60% gain, but the raw converter falls over when trying to convert the 1+gbyte avi!!!!

Seeing was pretty bad here (4/10)

i am trying to get around it. It is looking good for tonight, i might drop it back to say 1500 frames

[xelasnave]

They look excellent and you are using a dob great stuff
alex

[asimov]

Top shelf Mike!! Wish I could get colours like that!

[ballaratdragons]

Excellent Mike. Wish mine would come out as crisp without pixellating!

[rumples riot]

Nice stuff Mike. I was up the same time, but the seeing and damn clouds conspired against me. Your Saturn images are improving all the time. Well done.

[matt]

Great stuff Mike.

[Starkler]

Nice pictures but something has me perplexed.

It seems that Saturn is the one planet that on a good night, I can see visually better than almost any image posted. On Jupiter and Mars, the imagers easily win for detail.

Has anyone else noticed the same or have any explanation?

[davidpretorius]

mars + jupiter = very bright
saturn = not very bright

i cant turn the gain / exposure on my eyes???

[videoguy]

Well done Mike!

[iceman]

Thanks for the feedback guys.

Here's one more from the night, where I increased the gain to 100% to try and capture some of the moons, which I then had intentions of using in a composite with a properly exposed version.

But because the transparency wasn't too good, it didn't overexpose enough! Plus, most of the moons were just out of frame.

Anyway here's one with Enceladus.. and you can see the crepe ring really clearly in this one too.

[davidpretorius]

i hate laptop screens, i can't see that moon.

I have noticed on the imageplus yahoo groups, guys buying big CRT monitors to properly view things!!!

well done anyway Mike. It is amazing that you have to use so much gain on saturn and low exposure

[atalas]

Excellent work Mike , love them Saturns !

[Striker]

Very nice Mike,

I too like the 3rd one..but to me there all good.

BTW...where are the defraction spikes....hehehe

[Robert_T]

I have noticed this too - thought it was just my imagination, but on reflection expect it is because saturn has a lot of sharp divisions of contrast that are more easily detected with the eye (eg the globe, the rings, the globe shadow on the rings the ring divisions etc )and that these transitions of/in shading are generally sharper and more contrasty that the shade transitions on the other planets - what you think?

[cristian abarca]

Good shots Mike. It's good to see that you can take good pictures with an EQ platform. I'm going to build one and try my hand at the planets soon .

Regards Cristian

[Starkler]

Thats probably it, along with the fact that the features are all linear in nature and probably easier to pick up with the eye for that reason.

I know I can visually see discrete steps in brightness in the innermost rings, but only a few of the best Saturn images posted here have captured this.