My first adventures into planetary imaging - Jupiter 4 Dec

[blueskies123_89 (George)]

Hello everyone

I'm usually a Deep Sky person, but recently decided to take the plunge into planetary stuff, to see what I can get. I took a set of Jupiter photos on the night of 4 Dec, and just got around to processing them.

The scope is a William Optics 132mm APO refractor, with 5x televue barlow giving FL4625mm. The camera is a DMK21 mono firewire (almost first light for it, except for a few test runs), with LRGB filters that came from my Meade DSI II pro. Its a small scope for planets, but its the one I've got from deep sky.

Each colour are approximately stacks of 900 frames. I would really appreciate any comments on the processing, is it too harsh, colour balance etc? The seeing was not too bad at the start of the night, but got worse very fast.

I've also included a gif of the rotation through R filter. Hope it works.

Cheers,
George

[mswhin63 (Malcolm)]

Hi George, you have nice detail especially for first image.

Just some points, I have experience related to your images. The resolution you are using may not be the right so use another one that doesn't squash the images I found by using 1280 x 1024 I squashed the image. I then tried 1280 x 960 and the image was perfect. You may be able to stretch the image (resize horizontally) to fix this.

I also found out only today how important it is to get the whitebalance right during capture. It can be resolved using colour alignment and balance and lots of fiddling around, but I found the time to take to resolve is very long. Histogramming each channel to equal each other is the best way I found.

Keep it up, fill in those times were light pollution makes it hard to Deepsky

[Paul Haese]

George,

overall this is a very good result for you first time in this field of endeavour. Things to remember.

Focus after each run. It will take some time to get your eye in on focus.

Colour balance is a tricky thing. I have been of late trying to use the Hubble colours as these would be the closest to what the eye would actually see.

If you would like try using my Tutorial to get a sharper image. Deconvolution is quite necessary for this type of imaging.

http://paulhaese.net/planetaryprocessing.html

The planet as already mentioned is being stretched a bit. The poles should be flatter. It is most likely an image size you have chosen.

[Troy]

Good pictures George