iceman
23-02-2006, 12:02 PM
Hi guys.
Was surprised to see the clouds clearing last night, so I set the scope up and started imaging at around 10pm. The seeing looked great through the eyepiece, Saturn looked really lovely and the banding on the globe and the crepe ring were really nice to look at.
I setup the laptop to take a few quick avi's (took 5 in total), and left the scope out for Jupiter. I checked the radar, no rain in sight and none forecasted. Got up at 4:15am this morning, and it had been raining. My scope, base, everything was wet :( :( Clouds as well, so no Jupiter.
Anyway, back to Saturn.. the transparency was poor as usual, I had gain at 75% (at 10fps) just to get a level of 120 on the white meter.
But I captured enough frames (3500 in total), so I was able to smooth it out.
Attached are the results of my processing - the left image is just the red channel after the normal processing routine (split into rgb, 500 red frames stacked in registax, medium wavelets, LR deconvolution in AstraImage). The right image is the re-combined RGB image.
I'm really happy with the red channel - it's smooth, sharp and has the CD all the way around. No storm unfortunately. The RGB image is also my best I think, however the blue channel looks really really nasty and i'm sure it didn't help at all.
Interestingly enough, I had gamma set low for these captures, and while it means the crepe ring is barely visible, it helped bring out banding on the disc. So it seems to be a trade off with gamma/brightness, versues capturing the crepe ring and getting banding on the globe. At least in my case.
Saturn was 31° altitude at this time.
Comments welcome.
Was surprised to see the clouds clearing last night, so I set the scope up and started imaging at around 10pm. The seeing looked great through the eyepiece, Saturn looked really lovely and the banding on the globe and the crepe ring were really nice to look at.
I setup the laptop to take a few quick avi's (took 5 in total), and left the scope out for Jupiter. I checked the radar, no rain in sight and none forecasted. Got up at 4:15am this morning, and it had been raining. My scope, base, everything was wet :( :( Clouds as well, so no Jupiter.
Anyway, back to Saturn.. the transparency was poor as usual, I had gain at 75% (at 10fps) just to get a level of 120 on the white meter.
But I captured enough frames (3500 in total), so I was able to smooth it out.
Attached are the results of my processing - the left image is just the red channel after the normal processing routine (split into rgb, 500 red frames stacked in registax, medium wavelets, LR deconvolution in AstraImage). The right image is the re-combined RGB image.
I'm really happy with the red channel - it's smooth, sharp and has the CD all the way around. No storm unfortunately. The RGB image is also my best I think, however the blue channel looks really really nasty and i'm sure it didn't help at all.
Interestingly enough, I had gamma set low for these captures, and while it means the crepe ring is barely visible, it helped bring out banding on the disc. So it seems to be a trade off with gamma/brightness, versues capturing the crepe ring and getting banding on the globe. At least in my case.
Saturn was 31° altitude at this time.
Comments welcome.