Cheers for the second pic compliments guys. Have you stil got your scouse accent Westsky la? Jack, you've gotta get into astrophotography its awsome. I've never used the toucam but I recommend the Meade LPI. Check out this pic from last night, Jupiter with Ganymede and its shadow. You can just see IO and europa if you look very hard.
Cheers
Yeah I was well pleased with that one, never seen a shadow on jupiter before nevermind capture it. Its clear tonight although there's a near full moon. I'll try to get a few sneeky pics in before it gets too cold for my mum
Check out this saturn from last night. Its not processed at all.
Cheers
Thanks Paul
These pics where taken through thin cloud and jupiter was pretty low down so I recon with time the're going to get better. I'm going to look into buying a toucam in the near future i think also. What would you say you get the best pics from your Toucam or your cannons
AWESOME
Thanks for that Paul. I'll give that a go myself. It looks much better. The cloud bands, shadow and moons look much sharper. I'm learning loads because of you guys.
Cheers
For plantetary shots to start out with Simon, definately the ToUcam. I took 250 shots with my canon 300D the other night and ditched the lot. I've found its a whole new ball game. You need short enough exposures to capture relatively still, clear images, yet long enough for the CCD to capture it.
I was trying Positive Eyepiece Projection with the canon with really long focal length and very slow f/ratio (I don't have the exact figures on me at the moment but somewhere round F10 m and f/50 - 100). Thought if I captured enough I could registax them. Unfortuanely my exposure times were too long, even keeping them to a minimum (1/10 sec) I couldn't get a still image. They were all blurred through atmoshperic motion. I was using the hacked firmware so I could use ISO 3200 and mirror lock up. I'll either have to shorten my focal length or use a longer focal length eyepiece. When I get home I'll dig up the details and post them if you're interested
Keep going with what you're doing. If I can suggest, open up your Saturn image in registax again, go to the waveletting page, open up the historgram dialogue box and using the blue slider on the right bottom, drag it to the left to reduce the blue in your image. I think You might be surprised at the change.
Cheers for the info paul. It is a little on the blue side isn't it, i'll give it a tweeking in registax as you said cheers. If you could post the details that would be great. All the info helps a lot. Don't go to too much trouble though.
Cheers
That looks better Andrew. Maybe even slide the red down a bit as well.
Simon, a couple of other things you might consider trying is redo the lot but when you get to the "Optimize" tab do a reference frame of around 10% of the total frames. Follow the instructions that come up on the screen. You may find a big difference. Alternatively when you finish your waveletting etc form normal processing, save the image and then do a realign with processed. You will probably find with the resultant image you will have to lower the values on your wavelet sliders when it is finished. Save this image and compare with the first to see if there is any improvement. I often do at least 3 - sometimes 8 - different processes with each avi to get the best result. Go here to check out details of some of the settings I'm using. though they do vary considerably from night to night.
Everyone let me introduce you to my mate from down the road phil. I told him about the tips I was getting from the forum. Cheers phil I didn't know you had a lap top. That would be great though if you could come around and give me a hand with it cheers. Thanks for tweeking my saturn Andrew, that looks awesome, much more natural. I don't know why the lpi takes them blue, still learning about the settings. The first pic was a normal yellow then the rest blue. Thanks again
This might sound a bit stupid but where is the 'optimise' tab
I'm new to the LPI and registax I had a look but can't find it. Also to obtain these pics I didn't save them as avi's but as bmp's. I'm new to avi's , bmp's and jpegs. If I'm right I think the lpi takes pics as the planet floats across the screen and selects the best one then saves it as a single bmp. I might be wrong. Is it better to save as avi's. Sorry if I sound a bit basic
What program did you use to capture the images? Autosuite? If you are and you're saving the images one by one, right? Then when you open them into registax and you align them you then move on to the optimize page then to the stacking page then to the waveletting page. I do my registax processing page by page. Make sure the tick is taken out of the automatic box and manual box at the top of the alignment page. Then whan you click "align", the alignment stops when its finished and you click the "limit" button under the alignment one. this then takes you to the "optimize" page. This is where you will find the "reference frame" button. Doing it page by page give me more options in adjusting the image. Don't worry about mucking around with the resampling and drizzling yet, or the prefilters unless you just want to see what they do. Same with the stacking page. Infact I just click "optimize and stack" after the reference frame is completed.
I've had a bit of a play with yours, enlarged it colour adjustment only in registax. I pushed the waveletting a bit much, but there's still a lot of detail that could be brought out.
Paul that Saturn picture you have processed for me is awesome. I never thought that i would take a pic that would look as good as that, and its only the 2nd night of using the lpi. Due to my lack of knowledge so far of taking pics all i have been doing is picking the best of the bunch and playing with the wavelets. I'll go through the instructions you have given me now to see what I can do. I appreciate the help a lot . Thanks
Simon
I bet the skies are better down under
![[1ponders]'s Avatar](../vbiis/customavatars/avatar45_9.gif){kind=avatar}
Better than I ever managed with the LPI.
