Mars from Sydney, May 8th

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

Having had my appetite whet earlier this week, the promise of another reasonable evening in Sydney urged me to put the C11 to the test. SkippySky was predicting seeing as '7' much the same as Monday night, but also predicting the seeing would deteriorate later. This turned out to be the case, as my attempts at getting some better shots of Saturn failed, and after midnight clouds pulled over. I'd just packed up and it started to rain!

The kit:

C11 Edge HD on EQ6
TV Powermate 2.5x
QHY5L-ii, 640x480 ~30fps

The images were stacked in AS!2 and processed with some sharpening and tweaking of the red channel (+5%), the first from 25% of 4000 frames, the second from 15% of 5000 frames.

Looks like cloud over Hellas and Eden/Chryse and north of Acidalium

[Amaranthus (Barry)]

Terrific! Just a *tad* artificially smooth over some areas, but overall, REALLY nice work. The planetary rotation between the two shots looks amazing.

Are you going to run the data through Registax and play with those wavelets?

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

Thanks Barry! There's not a lot in my data in those smooth areas besides a little noise

Haven't waved the magic let yet...my eyes are tired. I captured *91* different sequences last night and just sorted through them all

[Amaranthus (Barry)]

I believe you can stack multiple sequences in AS!2 - just have to make sure they are not so long as to get too much rotation.

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

I tend to record 1000 frames at a time, then I've been concatenating and cropping with PIPP before loading into AS!2.

I'm not sure how long it is before the rotation causes a problem, but it takes me about 5 minutes to get 4-5000 frame sets. The sequences for the two images were taken about half an hour apart.

[John K]

Nice going - looks like you have an image good enough to perhaps even resample 1.5 x as well.

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

Thanks John! What's the best tool for doing that?

[John K]

Originally Posted by Camelopardalis

Thanks John! What's the best tool for doing that?

AS2 or Registax when you stack I find works for me - otherwise you can also try with Photoshop.

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

OK thanks John, I'll try some different combinations

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

Here's a repro, using Registax 6 and wavelets, 500 frames, original size and resized

[Amaranthus (Barry)]

Niiiiice! So what were your wavelet settings?

Here is one I did last night -- best 50 frames of 5000 using AS!2 (No barlow, no post-AS!2 touchups)

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

I reckon it could use some wavelet magic the few I've experimented with, those that have "good" signal seem to respond well to the wavelets, those that don't seem to look just as good out of AS!2

From memory, this is of the order of (Gaussian) 60, 40, 40, 30, 40, 50 with denoise 0.1-0.15 and sharpen around 0.1 - top two 0.12 or so. However, it's very capture dependent...my camera seems to be quite noisy on above a certain gain value and I haven't been able to defeat the noise on my Saturn captures. Mars being brighter, doesn't seem too bad though. Your camera could be quite different, for example, compared to mine your image seems to have quite low noise for only 50 frames. I'm not sure what the technique is supposed to be but I just move the slider up until the enhancements look unrealistic and that back it off a bit. Then tweak the sharpen and denoise and see what happens.