Saturn 18th June

[asimov]

Seeing was pretty iffy so I'm surprised at this result. Last night it looked way better on the live feed & yet when it came to the stacking..I couldn't knock a passable image out to save my life so I didn't post. Go figure, but that's the nature of it. Moral of the story; DO NOT scrap that crappy looking AVI without at least making an attempt at stacking it.

In the shot Enceladus, Dione, Tethys & Rhea.

C11/DBK618

[Quark]

Definitely worth the effort Asi, a nice result.

Regards
Trevor

[carlstronomy]

Not a bad image at all infact pretty good for an ordinary night I would take it. It was a struggle yesterday I didn't even bother pressing record the image bounced and blurred so much on the monitor.

Is there a trick to getting the moons, I would love be able to catch the moons with my 9.25 SCT if possible, I have not seen any moons in my images.

Regards
Carl

[asimov]

Thanks Trevor. Mars was a complete washout because the seeing here is pretty nasty just on sunset, & everything (backyard, concrete slab & the scope) is nowhere near ambient. Not to mention I have the SCT collimated perfectly for one side of the meridian only; If I have to do a flip, I'd have to recollimate..

Thanks Carl. If you stretch the levels on the image after stacking, you should see any moons captured. It's a matter of then saving that stretched image, along with a normal image & copying & pasting the moons from the stretched image onto the normal into the corresponding positions. I use Paint.net for this as it memorises the positions automatically within 1 pixel. I then apply a Gaussian blur to the moons.

Attached is a copy of my stretched image for this data set.

[carlstronomy]

Thanks for the image for an example, I tried it last night and got what I thought was one moon. Now looking at yours on the AVI I tried there was only one moon which is better than none so I was on the right track. I will download Paint.net and learn how it all works thanks again.:thumbsup:

Carl

[Troy]

Good one, really like the moon 8-)

[carlstronomy]

Hi did another try with the stretching, I managed to get 3 moons but the back ground went blue and I noticed your image is still black on the back ground. What method and program did you use to stretch? I tried in Registax and got no moons and the result of 3 moons was once the image was saved and then loaded into Photoshop, but it did turn blue.:shrug:
I dont want to be a pain but if you could spare some more of your knowledge it would be greatly appreciated.:thanx:

Thanks
Carl

[Shiraz]

nice result Asi. regards Ray

[asimov]

Cheers Troy & Ray.

Carl, I use Autostakkert for aligning/stacking & Registax (ver. 6) only gets used for applying waveletts & in the case of moons, I use it for stretching. I use brightness & contrast to bump up the levels just to see if there are any moons & if there is, I'll then use the historgram tab to fine tune it. I'll then play around with the colour balance until I get a somewhat natural colour but considering I usually desaturate the moons once I've got them pasted onto my 'normal' image in Paint.net it doesn't really matter. Background colour basically is null & void.

For the copying & pasting, I zoom the image up until at least 500X & then carefully use a round mask placed over the moon, then it's just a matter of copying, & pasting onto the normal image. This is done one moon at a time. After moon placement, a blur must be used to smooth out the ragged, sharp moon edges but once again, using a round mask that covers the moon.

[Clayton]

Lovely shot Asi :thumbsup:

[Matt Wastell]

Beautiful image - congratulations!

[asimov]

Thanks Rob & Matt!