Uranus and Neptune

[alphajuno (Dave)]

I was messing around a bit with Uranus and Neptune and this is what I came up with. The planets were taken at f/29 within a month of opposition. The moons were at f/10. Suggestions are always welcome. Thanks.

[Dennis]

Nice work Dave! You’ve done a nice job on these outer gas giants. It would be nice to see others having a go at these targets too. Whilst quite challenging, it is also quite do-able and I know I had a great time and lots of fun during my attempts.

Just a couple of questions:

• Did you record or memorise the exposure settings?
• How did you balance the colour filters for the LRGB or RGB images of the planetary discs?

When I recorded Uranus during a recent session, using the default values of 1:1:1.6 made it come out too blue!

Cheers

Dennis

[alphajuno (Dave)]

I didn't record all the adjustments I made unfortunately and usually I bracket too. I'll try to record it next time - I usually just do if I am subtracting darks. But the red and green channels were probably .4s to .5s/frame and the blue was probably a little longer. I usually try to get the histograms about equal and I combined them with equal settings but ended up with 1/.85/1 since it was so green with equal settings. The green channel was very strong so using color balance in Maxim DL and Photoshop elements I boosted the blue a lot and the red some. I tried to match the color of on-line pictures. I did take lum video but the rgb combinations seemed to have more color so I just did rgb.

For Neptune, it was probably about 1.2s to 1.7s/frame for each channel, but I can't really remember. The blue channel was brighter than other planets but I still boosted the blue in the post-processing. I didn't like the LRGB results with Neptune either - too colorless.

I think I need a better blue filter though from reading other's posts. My blue channel is always weak. Maybe Santa will be good to me.

Thanks!