Saturn (24 Dec 2005, 03:16am)

[Dennis]

Hello

I woke up at 2:30am to continue imaging the Moon, hoping that the great seeing of the last few days would continue. Unfortunately the image on the Notebook display was noticeably worse that yesterday morning, so I drove the ‘scope to Saturn which seemed to be less affected.

As per Mike’s suggestion, I maxed out the “saturation” slider hoping for some richer colours. Although slightly improved on my previous efforts, it still a little washed out compared to Rumples richer colours and Mike's additional processing. This time, the Cassini Division “horns” are less pronounced.

Is there a recommended capture limit for Saturn, so I'm not flaunting the laws of planetary rotation? I understand that Jupiter avi's should be restricted to 90 secs to limit the effects of planetary rotation.

Equipment details:
Celestron C9.25
TeleVue x2.5 PowerMate
Philips ToUcam
Takahashi EM200 mount
JMI NGFS motofocus

Imaging details:
Acquired with K3CCDTools
1/25 sec
10fps
Stacked withRegistax3
339 frames from 2100 acquired.

24th December 2005, 03:16 am, AEST.

Cheers

Dennis

[Robert_T]

Hi Dennis, another ripper, well done:) . I glanced through the french doors around 3.30am into mist and thought "good excuse to sleep in"...;)

You've got some really good fine detail here, even a hint of that other division (Enkes?). For colour you can play around a bit with colour weighting under the Histogram tab in the wavelets section. What are you using for post-processing outside registax as most programs will allow colour balancing to help you get a more pleasing tone (though I personally favour more muted natural tones closer to what you have here)? Astra Image is very good, downloaded vers 2 and reistered for ~$50 - allows colour balancing and deconcolution processing.

Now go and get some sleep :)

cheers,

[Dennis]

3:30am??? Is that the time your Xmas party finished? ;)

Cheers

Dennis

[Robert_T]

nah mate, that was just when the recovery kicked in :nerd:

[iceman]

Hey Dennis.

Another fine job. The colours are still a bit washed out, but try astraimage for deconvolution which can sometimes fix the colours a bit.

With regards to planet rotation, unless you're at huge focal lengths and trying to capture storms on the surface, really there's no limit to how long you can capture for at the focal lengths you (and I) are using. I capture for 5 minutes on Saturn. I could capture for longer but then it makes processing a real chore because it takes so long to go through the frames :) At 10fps, 3000 frames is plenty :) Though my last Saturn effort I combined multiple avi's for 5000 frames of input.

I then used bird's ppmcentre to sort them in quality, deleted the 2000 worst frames and took 3000 good frames into registax. I ended up stacking about 1500 I think.

Another thing with the colour - you'll notice the processing artifacts around the edge of the globe - that's usually a sign of underexposure. Try increasing the gain and/or gamma to give you more exposure. That might also help your colour.

Hope that helps.

[Dennis]

Thanks Mike for a very useful bunch of tips for me to try on my next outing. Gee, is this what they call "remote learning"?

This community never ceases to amaze, and inspire me, with the helpful advice and willingness to share.

Now if only the World would follow suite - peace and harmony on Earth at last?

Cheers

Dennis

[Starkler]

Dennis thats certainly one of the better Saturns posted here for detail.
Well done :)

[rumples riot]

That is one hell of an image. Congrats you have a great image. Your seeing must have been awesome. Lovely image.

[asimov]

Nice image Dennis!......So that processing artifact problem is from UNDERexposure...here I was thinking it was from overexposure! Back to the drawing board..

[Dennis]

Hi Asimov

Hmm, I thought it was from seeing, as the planetary disc was wobbling quite a lot this morning. Bak to skool 4 me 2.

Cheers

Dennis