[Quark (Trevor)]

Hi Troy,

You should be well pleased with your first effort.

Some of my thoughts that may be of assistance.

1) The orientation of images is a personal thing and there is no problem with what looks best to you, however, the IAU convention is to have South on top and West to the right.

2) If your scope is on a Equatorial mount, rotate your camera such that when you turn off your RA drive the image drifts parallel with the long axis of your capture screen. This will mean that the vast majority of drive corrections that you will need to apply will be in only one axis, RA.

3) With your colour camera you can take 3 minute captures for Jupiter, the more data the better.

4) Download Virtual Dub & ppmcentre from the resources site of IIS.
ppmcentre or ninox is the creation of Bird, one of the best planetary imagers on Earth. Convert your avi to bmp files in Virtual Dub. Look at the individual frames, deleting as many as required until the first 30 or so are good frames.

Load the Virtual Dub output file into ppmcentre to crop, centre and grade all of the images in the output folder.

5) Now when you load the bmp files into Registax V5 the best images will be at the start of the que and already centred. You will find that Registax will do a lot better job due to the prior work with Virtual Dub and ppmcentre.

6) Generally speaking, the better your data the less is the amount of processing that is required. Don't go overboard with the wavelet processing in Registax.

7) If you want to get right into planetary imaging then I would highly recommend Astra Image Pro for deconvolution processing, following your initial Registax processing. After Registax and decon with Astra Image Pro I finish off in Photo Shop CS4.

8) Get into the habit of recording everything that you do, as far as capture settings and processing regime goes. It is only by doing this that you can compare, in a meaningful way, what works and what does not work. You will, over time, create your own capture and processing regime that works for your particular scope & equipment.

Above all else have fun with it.

Regards
Trevor