Had another go at Jupiter this morning, there was a GRS transit and Red Jr to be grabbed. Canberra is having a run of still evenings with no cloud, and the seeing is hovering around the 8/10 mark, good enough for me to get some nice results.
One thing that's frustrating when the seeing is variable - I might get a good run on the red channel and then the green and blue go bad, and so the resulting colour image looks bad. I'll show you what I mean - image #1 is just the RED channel from one of the runs this morning, and compare it to the colour images that follow - you'd never guess but the right hand colour images uses this as its red channel, the green and blue were pretty bad and bring down the quality of the final result.
This red channel image might be my best Jupiter image yet.
Here's a composite image - I used the green channel from the following run (4 minutes later, but when the heck...) and the red/blue channels from the image above.
The better quality green channel lifts the image quality a bit, even though the green layer doesn't line up around the edge anymore, it's also processed softer than the images above.
Great Pics Bird. Er... are you looking at the red channel once split in Astro image? or is this more to do with RAW mode imaging? I noticed that when I split an image I see more detail in one channel than another. Is this dependant upon the item you are imaging?
I capture the channels separately, process them separately in registax and then use astra image to combine them into a colour image.
I do it this way cause I have a monochrome camera and filter wheel...so I don't see the colour image until the very end of the process. The red channel image above was made by processing the 1300 frames of monochrome data captured straight out of the camera, loaded into registax and then transferred to astra image for a bit of deconvolution and tinkering.
btw the reason the channels all look different is that:
- they focus at different places due to the presence of barlows etc (ie glass) elements, so in a colour camera you can't get them all in focus at the same time.
- The earths atmosphere has a more severe blurring effect on blue, but red comes through mostly ok.
- the planets themselves have more or less detail in each of these colours due to the colours being associated with clouds at different altitudes, on jupite the blue colur tends to be associated with very high altitude clouds that are less defined than the low altitude (red) clouds.
Hi Bird, no doubt you have answered the Q many times before but how do you get your image scale?
I've been splitting my channels for quite awhile, but every time I have a close inspection of the Blue it always looks pretty good, where as from what I read in posts/threads etc. I expect the blue to look worse than the red & green. I'm not sure whats going on with that.
Hi Asi, my scope has a focal length of 1800mm, and the I use a 6x barlow to get up somewhere around 11000mm. The image would be even larger except my camera has a pixel size of 7.4 micron, about 30% larger than the ToUcam so it shrinks my images by 30% :-)
looks like little red is getting closer to GRS though at a higher latitude... wonder if they'll merge?
