Hi all, well have reprocessed this image with some help from Bird and I think that it is heeps better.
What I did, was manually go through the avi frame by frame. I ended up with 120 images that were half resonable. Then I set mitchell 2x resample, create reference frame of 50, wavelet settings 10,10,10,3.2,3.1,1.7 at step 1
gamma 0.8, brightness -10
then I saved the image and loaded the saved image into Astra Image, and then: gamma scale of 0.8 resample to 380 and rotated image, I then did LR deconvolution 10 turns radius 4 from image.
Then processed in photoshop with a despeckle, raised the colour, and saturation.
That's much better Paul. You've brought out far more detail and to me the colour looks more realistic. The only thing missing is the moon you seem to have misplaced from the first image
I think I might have to start having a play with Astro Image
Well, just finished a run this morning, now 6.25 am, seeing was ok, thought it might be better given the low temp over night and the storm that passed our way in last two days.
Anyway tried shooting with the toucam. Two things have cropped up. First is the grain of the image, I have the gain set to almost zero and it is still grainy. What do I do about that?
Second is the colour, I did not use the IR filter and most of the images were a reddy colour. I set white balance to auto just before I commenced imaging. How do I get the image to be the neutral colour, or how If using the IR filter do I get the image from the blue colour to the correct colours? Mike, I guess you might have recent experience with this, and you seem to have got the hang of the colour and grain. Some tips please?
Aside from that it went quite well except for focus, did not get around to masking up the hartman mask, and this morning I needed the dew shield on (time for a kendrick heater I think) so I had to wing focus. So this is where I am.
It will always look grainy on the preview window, even with Gain set to 0. You'll find that once it's all stacked up the grain will go away, and what speckle is left can be despeckled in PS.
As for colour balance, I set white balance to auto, leave it on the screen for 5-10 seconds (or longer when you have tracking), and then uncheck it off auto BEFORE you start capturing. Other things which affect colour (for me), are the saturation setting, and the gamma setting. I set gamma to 0, and saturation to 90-95%. In the end, it comes down to personal preference.
Jupiter is a reddy colour, so I don't know what sort of natural tones you're looking for - I guess when you show us your processed image we'll get a feel for it.
I don't use that blue IR filter, I don't/didn't like it and have returned it. I'm getting the Edmund Scientific one instead, it's $120 (instead of $60), but it's coated and has neutral colour. It should arrive by the end of next week with any luck.
Ahh now I know why it cost that much, Like you I don't think much of it. Thanks for the tips on imaging. That makes a lot of sense, but forgot to take off the Auto setting on white balance. O well, never mind, No GRS today anyway. Not one until 445am 25 Jan. I think.