Saturn 3rd September

[bluesilver (Peter)]

Taken with a Skywatcher Esprit 150 with a .77 reducer
Camera is a Player One Mars II
Forgot i still had the reducer in from a previous night trialing some DSO imaging
First time trying to process a planetary image
Not quiet the best focus, found it a bit tricky
Taken using Firecapture
Stacked in Autostakert
Processed in Registax2
Any advice is appreciated.

[Dave882 (David)]

That’s a fantastic effort! You’ve managed good colour and detail too.

Obviously, next time take off the reducer. You should aim for f-ratio approx 5x the pixel size of your camera for optimum sampling. Usually this would require a Barlow of some kind. You want the fastest frame rates possible so utilise ROI and play with gain (not overboard) to get the histogram between 40-60%. If you post your capture and processing parameters then we might be able to help you a little more too.

[bluesilver (Peter)]

Cheers, Yes i forgot to mention that i had a 2.5X powermate in the mix also.
I can't remember what the capture parameters were, I just played around with the gain and exposure until the image looked good on the screen before capturing a 2 minute video in SER format.

[Averton (P and C)]

Great effort Peter. Your processing looks pretty good too. As David said, capture as many frames as you can in your 2 minutes which isn't too bad a length of time for that size scope on Saturn. The conflicting thing is also to try and keep your exposure short 10ms or less is considered good, but the trade off is increased gain. For focusing try changing the gamma in the preview window to make the image more contrasted and focus on the boundaries, the Cassini ring is a pretty good choice for focusing Saturn. In Firecapture make sure you turn the gamma off again before capturing.

[bluesilver (Peter)]

Appreciated,
Will make a note of those things for next time.
Cheers.

[rustigsmed (Russell)]

looks pretty good to me Peter. nice job