First picture of Saturn

[miker03 (Mike)]

This is my first post http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/....es/happy19.gif. I took this picture mid last week in fair seeing conditions. It is my first sucessful attempt (the first being over exposed) using neximage ccd on a celestron nexstar 6. I struggled with the settings on AMcap and with Registax 5.1 as this is all very new to me.http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/....ies/screwy.gif Welcome any advice but in the meantime will continue to experiment with the settings to see whether I can get a better image to process. Here's hoping for clear skies.

Mike

[Daveskywill (David)]

It looks like you got the exposure is right, like you said. That's because (partly) you can see the darkness between the ring plane and planet on both sides. But it's a little bit dim. My suggestion is to try tuning the brightness and contrast in maybe Adobe Photoshop if you have it or something similar.

[miker03 (Mike)]

David

thanks for the suggestion. I reduced the gain and brightness thinking that stacking the images would be better with dimmer images. Looks like a steep learning curve here!

Mike

[that_guy (Tony)]

hey mike, did you use any barlows with this image?

[irwjager (Ivo)]

Hey Mike,

Welcome to astro imaging - hope you get hooked too!
If you're doing planetary work, do give the GIMP a try. It's free image processing software similar to PhotoShop and is quite capable for beginners doing planetary work.
When you sink your teeth into DSOs then it's time to upgrade as the GIMP doesn't deal with low signals very well (the GIMP for now only deals with 8-bit signals).

I normalized the levels of your image and applied some deconvolution to better see the rings.

Cheers,

[miker03 (Mike)]

Thanks Ivo and Tony. I didn't use a barlow as the image was not staying in the centre of the field of view. Once I get better at setting up the scope and getting the tracking more accurate I will try a barlow. Thanks also for showing me how the image can be improved. I will give Gimp a try when a get a few more images to play with.

[miker03 (Mike)]

I have taken another image of Saturn a few weeks ago. A slight improvement and I have also been playing around with Gimp to see what different settings do to the image.

[irwjager (Ivo)]

Nice! We're starting to see some detail and I personally think the colors in the second image are spot on too.
Once you're comfortable with the various standard tools in the GIMP, have a look at installing the GMIC plug-in. It contains a bunch of additional features (deconvolution is one of them - it can do wonders for planetary and moon images).
Definitely making some nice progress there Mike - keep it up!

[iceman (Mike)]

Great start, well done!