Saturn video to process. Have a go!

[Poita (Peter)]

Below is a very short capture of Saturn this morning with a DBK21, captured from a C9.25 with 5x powermate.

Download it and see what you can do with it in your stacking software of choice.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7231471/satc0003%2004-06-11.avi

The file will have finished uploading in about an hour (say by 8am Sunday)

[Poita (Peter)]

another one here:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7231471/satc0004%2004-08-42.avi

[lepton3 (Ivan)]

Peter,

I had a go at your first video. Because this is Beginners Astrophotography, I'm going to spout some advice (although I am by no means an expert!).

Firstly, I expect you are mindful the size of files you can upload, but the number of frames in the AVI is way too small. If that video had about 2500 frames in it, the result could have been much better.

I stacked 75% of the frames in AS!2, using about 15 alignment points, mostly along the rings.

Then I wavelet sharpened in Registax 6. I went quite far, which introduced a lot of noise. This would be better if there were more frames.

I also did an automatic RGB align in R6.

Then I did a noise filter using the Wavelet noise filter in Fitswork. I was quite aggressive, as there was a lot of noise from the sharpening.

I brought the result into Gimp, and did a colour balance adjust to get a neutral B ring (++blue, --red). Also did a bit of unsharp mask.

Then I added a mask layer to clean up the background noise.

Final result I think suggests you could get a decent image out of 2500 frames or so.

-Ivan

[Shark Bait (Stu)]

Thanks Peter, now I am starting to understand how to use Regi Stax 5.1

This is a great idea for the beginners on this forum. When I end up with something half decent, I will post it.

[Forgey (Paula)]

I had a go at processing saturn, here is my attempt.
Processed in registax 6, stacksize was 211.

[Poita (Peter)]

Yeah, I know it isn't enough frames to get a great result, that is a really good point, if capturing planets you will want as many frames as you can get to get you signal to noise ratio more into the signal department and further from the noise. The file sizes are the limit of my uploadable size at the moment, though you can combine the two file as an exercise.

I'm uploading a 3GB file at the moment for people to have another go, but it won't be ready till tomorrow.

It is more for the exercise of using video files for stacking, as many people thinking about doing planetary buy the gear first, without realising what is involved, and I reckon it's better to have a go first and see what it is like before spending any $$