[Shiraz (Ray)]

Originally Posted by Paul Haese

My aim is always to produce an image that looks like it was taken from space. I have a body of work dating back to 2004 and can say my processing has undergone many changes in technique over that time. However I have always tried to maintain fine detail with as low noise as possible in my images.

I do however think that people who know nothing about imaging should keep their opinions to themselves as they have no idea what is involved.

The view through a telescope is vastly different on most occassions to what you can image and extract from data. There is only one occassion that both Anthony and I know showed almost picture perfect views of Jupiter. That was in 2006 during our visit to the Grampians. Detail was so nice visually one could see tiny cyclones and very fine detail in my 18" SDM. I have not seen seeing like this again.

thanks for those comments Paul - things sure have changed a lot over the decade since you guys first started using high frame rates for planetary imaging.

Really good visual viewing conditions are to be treasured since they seem to be so rare.

Originally Posted by clive milne

Your level of honesty is reflected in your work.

thanks very much Clive.

Originally Posted by barry2718

A fascinating read. This explains my difficulty in seeing the ring planet in my Celestron (8"). Last night as it rose the distortions where very evident and reduced as it got higher. At 10pm the moons where evident close to the planet in my 8" SCT but i could still see the image tearing. The best viewing was with a 21mm eye piece on the 2000mm focal length scope. With the 6mm eye piece it was very blurry and distorted. I guess I can only dream about seeing Saturn as good as shown here. Barry - Macarthur Astro.

Hi Barry. FWIW I find that seeing is generally best when the jetstream at 200hPa is below about 40 kts - that does not guarantee good seeing, but a fast jetstream generally rules it out.

Originally Posted by Quark

Hi Ray, very well put. I have often heard people remark that Saturn should be depicted as it appears in the eyepiece, I generally say to them, why would they want to aim so low. My 16" F4.5 Newt has a F/L of 1836mm but I image at a F/L of 9669.6mm.

With a state of the art CCD and high frame rates, the ability to stack many thousands of frames, thus improving the signal to noise ratio means that the detail that can be resolved now by amateurs is right up there, better than the professionals could produce 10 years ago. Birds Jupiter from Exmouth, in my opinion, is the best Jupiter image obtained from Earth.

The professionals are becoming ever more aware of the quality and resolution of amateur work and are actively seeking out amateurs to support their research. A very current example of this involves both Bird & I. We are supporting a research team from JPL, supplying possible target features along with drift charts created from our own data that accurately predict the positions of these features. The team will have Subaru on April 30th and then move over to the IRTF May 1st.

To show the detail that is of scientific interest means, on occasions, processing deeper than normally we would to just create an esthetically pleasing image. The researchers are not interested in any way with artifacts that may be created in the rings due to the level of processing applied to resolve the target detail or structure that they are interested in across the disk of the planet.

It takes me a lot of hours to process my data from a good session, all of it is sent to the various reseach groups I am involved with and my processing is always done with the view to hi-lighting the detail & structure I know they will be interested in. The same data is posted here on IIS, I simply dont have enough time to do another version of it.

Hi Trevor. Hope all went well with your graft.

You raise many extra issues in your post, in particular the lack of interest of the science community in how pretty an image is - when trying to dig out a particular feature, who cares what artefacts appear elsewhere. Your use of animation to find persistent features allows quite low contrast regions to be confidently enhanced for science purposes.

It would seem that, for this sort of planetary imaging, scopes around 14-16 inches currently hit a sweet spot. Bigger scopes (eg the 1m at Pic du Midi) produce some excellent results, but they do not seem to be all that much better (if at all) than a good C14 or Newt (eg Bird's standout Jupiter). Maybe there is an underlying level of atmospheric blurring that limits what can be done with larger apertures and/or higher framerates. What do you think?



Thanks all for the iteresting discussions. Regards ray