A fairly good Saturn set (feel free to try processing)

[kinetic (Steve)]

Last night's better Saturn set of 3.

Attached below is my hack.
It is a mixture of my traditional Registax 5.1 process and
a tip I picked up that Sheeny suggested here

Anyone can have a go at processing this AVI that I uploaded to
the FTP uploads.
It is a 60Mb file, a zipped/ castrated version of the original
AVI, here

approx 1000 frames
1/33 sec
Gain 75/100
Gamma 0
YUY2
RAW uncompressed Flashed SPC 900 webcam
12" f/5 Newt
IR filter
9mm Eyepiece Projection.

[von Tom (Tom)]

Nice work there Steve. I had a go at your jpg

Tom

[von Tom (Tom)]

Steve I had a go at the avi in Registax 6 and ended up using nearly all the frames and here is the processed I used below:

Tom

[kinetic (Steve)]

Thanks Tom so much for your input.
I'm amazed you think the AVI can use all frames. I was culling it
down to 250-300 frames!

I tried a few Drizzle and resample attempts too..none seem to
better my original effort, and none come close to yours!

With the 12" mirror I can get away with up to 1/250 sec exposures but the
gain is cranked right up...very noisy in stacks.

One thing I haven't tried is combining 3 x AVIs of 1000 frames each in VDub
which were all 1/33 sec / gain 75/100 and spaced no more than 3 mins apart.

Steve

[irwjager (Ivo)]

Thanks Steve for putting your data up for download. It's a nice set!

This is my quick attempt (stacked in Registax, then processed in StarTools).

Cheers,

[von Tom (Tom)]

No worries Steve. If the frames are of similar quality then I generally use as many of them as I can to reduce the noise which allows for more processing of the image if needed. I modified the stacked frame I did to bring out faint detail and it appears you've captured at least one moon

Tom

[Shiraz (Ray)]

hi Steve. tried your avi, but could not improve significantly on your processing. No experience with webcams, but maybe a bit more signal might help the colour balance? - possibly longer exposures if seeing will allow. Otherwise, useful data and looks like the main limitation was the seeing. regards ray

[Clayton]

My litttle try

[kinetic (Steve)]

Thanks all,

it is certainly good to know you can get better out of this fairly average
data than I can

Ray, seeing and focus...focus is what is difficult to tweak when the
image is so wobbly most of the time and steady for brief periods

Steve

[Quark (Trevor)]

Hi Steve, just a thought.

Within the latest version of WinJUPOS there is a new feature that derotates avi's.

This allows the capture of quite long avi's. For instance maybe 10 or 12 mins for Saturn, then WinJUPOS can be used to derotate the entire avi to the mid point of the capture.

By doing that you end up with heaps more frames, any detail should remain aligned and even in crook seeing you would end up with more good frames to stack.

Regards
Trevor

[kinetic (Steve)]

Thanks Trev for the advice,

I have a few days of sets still to go through. The backlog is getting
bigger with each day!

My downfall is I'm always trying something new each night or tweaking
something and seeing if the data improves.
Therefore, the entire record of a Mars apparition is made up of
too many variables....ie different shutter/ WB/ Gamma / saturation
tweaks etc.
It is hard to stand back with so many variables and say, for example,
well that data was better because I had the gamma as 'X' and last night
I tried 'Y' because it is usually always different seeing etc.

For example....one night I tried cooling the webcam to zero.
Another night I tried flashing to RAW, uncompressed colour.
Another night I tried better rubber mounts on my stepper drive.
Still another, swapping the IR to my Baader IR etc.

Result...lots still to process, my recollection of what I tweaked
I forget....you get the picture
But I don't stop gathering data.
I'll have a look at WinJupos and see if I can get that working,
sounds interesting, cheers for the tip,

Steve