[EricB (Eric)]

Hi there!

I haven't posted for a while and its good to be back on IIS!

So far, I have have focused my astrophotography on the Moon (using mono CCD and CMOS cameras). However, in other to get more into planetary imaging I recently acquired a filterwheel and a set of RGB filters.

Mars is the first planet I have managed to image in RGB. The result is passable considering that the seeing wasn't very good. However, I am not very happy with the colour (compared to what I usually see on IIS). I have reworked the images several times, but I don't seem to be able to improve the colour which has a green tinge to it (the poles are greenish too). What am I doing wrong?

Here is how I went about it:

Equipment: Sky Watcher 10" on AZ EQ6, Zwo ASI120MM, TV Powermate x5, Zwo RGB filters and filterwheel.

- Capture: 2500 frames in each colour

- AVI cropping and centering in castrator

- Registering and stacking in Autostakkert 2

- Deconvolution and light sharpening in Astra Image

- Colorify, layering (RGB combination) and colour level adjustments in GIMP

I also have a few questions:

Should I capture the same amount of frames per filter or should each filter have a different frame ratio?

Are the layers misaligned in the final picture? (it seems to me that there are)

Is there a better RGB combination routine than the one I use (ie by using a more appropriate software than GIMP)?

Could the problem be with the filters?

Could you point me to a good tutorial on how to combine RGB images for planetary imaging?

I would be very grateful for your comments. Please be critical, I need to learn!

Thanks,

Eric