Saturn; 15th March. SE Qld

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

I'm pleasantly surprised at how this turned out after a bit of work. I had to shoot over the next door concrete tennis courts and saturn was jumping all over the place.

8"SCT + 2.5 powermate + DMK21AF04.AS + Baader IR/UV & RGB filters (still struggling with the colour balance of the Baader rgb filters)
RGB frames; best 150/900 for each.
Luminance best 200/1500.
Stacked with 2 MAP each in Reg 4, light 2 & 3 wavelets.
Individual frames aligned and colour combined in Images Plus.
Final touchups in PS.

[middy]

That looks great.

Can you post an individual frame. I'm just curious to see how bright they look. I had a go at Saturn with a Toucam last night and Saturn was very dark on each frame, barely visible in fact. I need to try again with the gain cranked up a bit I think.

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

Sure, they weren't very bright though in the r g b frames. I'll post a luminance shot.

[h0ughy (David)]

well Done Paul, fantastic result. The DMK is producing the goods!

[Dennis]

That is a very nice, clean image Paul - looks so much better than what I was getting around the same time last night - well done!

Cheers

Dennis

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

Thanks Guys. I would have done Jupiter as well but it was just clearing the tree line as I went to bed


Middy, here is a screen capture of a random frame from the luminance avi. As you can see it's not very clean or bright.

btw this isn't the real image scale. I had windoze media player set on about 200% I think when I ran it.

[middy]

Originally Posted by [1ponders]

Middy, here is a screen capture of a random frame from the luminance avi. As you can see it's not very clean or bright.

Thanks for that. It is still brighter than one of my individual frames.

[sheeny (Al)]

That's excellent Paul.

I captured some Saturn on the ToUcam on Wed night, but the results are very disappointing. There was a light breeze blowing, poor seeing... mixed with a lack of skill, and the die was cast!

Al.

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

Without knowing what your settings are Andrew, here are what I would have likely used for saturn with the ToUcam and an 8" SCT.

Tick your white balance box on the second tab.
Exposure: 1/25
Frame rate: 10 fps (if you need to go to 15 fps then that's fine, it'll be harder to get the image bright then, but if that's the case then the seeing probably isn't going to give you a good image anyway)
Gain: 50-60% (you can go higher but then you really start to fight the noise in processing)
Brightness: again keep to 50-60%

Each time you make an adjustment, wait a second or two to allow the autowhite balance to catchup.

If it still isn't very bright you can start to raise you gamma then, but I found that with Saturn too much gamma caused the center of the disk to burn out in processing.

Once you have your image as bright as you can with these setting, adjust your saturation til the colour looks about right. (Try to avoid too much noise and over exposure through gain and gamma, you can always ram it up a bit in processing if its dark, but there is little you can do if its over exposed.)

Now untick your auto white balance and start your capture. Easy huh!

[middy]

Originally Posted by [1ponders]

Without knowing what your settings are Andrew, here are what I would have likely used for saturn with the ToUcam and an 8" SCT.

Tick your white balance box on the second tab.
Exposure: 1/25
Frame rate: 10 fps (if you need to go to 15 fps then that's fine, it'll be harder to get the image bright then, but if that's the case then the seeing probably isn't going to give you a good image anyway)
Gain: 50-60% (you can go higher but then you really start to fight the noise in processing)
Brightness: again keep to 50-60%

Each time you make an adjustment, wait a second or two to allow the autowhite balance to catchup.

If it still isn't very bright you can start to raise you gamma then, but I found that with Saturn too much gamma caused the center of the disk to burn out in processing.

Once you have your image as bright as you can with these setting, adjust your saturation til the colour looks about right. (Try to avoid too much noise and over exposure through gain and gamma, you can always ram it up a bit in processing if its dark, but there is little you can do if its over exposed.)

Now untick your auto white balance and start your capture. Easy huh!

Thanks for that info. You forgot to mention the part about keep nudging the Dob while trying to make all these adjustments.

Will give it a go tonight hopefully.