Jupiter (B&W) 08/02/2015

[Twisted Lip]

Hi all

Seems as though everyone is getting good seeing right now so I took the chance of a clear night to go and capture a few B&W (still awaiting new LRGB filters) shots of Jupiter. 

As it turned out seeing wasn't that bad at all, still a bit wobbly in places but nothing a few more frames couldn't sort out. Processing is a little on the light side I'm afraid, I'll try a bit more later but in B&W I've found that processing doesn't provide the 'wow' factor as much as it does in colour. Stacked in AS!2, not drizzled, best 15% of 100 frames, wavelets nudged a bit in RS6. Taken using the c9.25, 2.5x powermate, PGR grasshopper3 via FireCapture.

Hope you like, comments welcome as ever!

Cheers

Will

PNG version:

Slightly noisier JPG version:

[PhotoGav]

Oooh, that's creeping closer to a good one! I reckon (and what do I know?!) that a shed load more frames in the stack would help massively to bring out the detail. I can see that it is in there, just waiting to come through. Keep at it!

What kind of settings did you use for this - frame rate, gain, exposure and histo fill?

[Twisted Lip]

Sorry Gav, I've just spotted a typo in my original post - it should be 'best 15% of 1000 frames' - not 100! I usually try and get between 1000 and 2000 frames and (depending on the quality that comes out the other end) stack between 15 and 25%.

As usual FireCapture was the weapon of capturing choice. Histo was in the region of 2/3 - 3/4 most of the time (160-180 generally). Frame rate was a shade under 40FPS, exposure was 23ms and gain 1198. Several vids were taken of varying exposure and gain (ranging between 20 and 36ms exposure and 800 - 1200 gain, always modified to try and keep the histo around 3/4.

I'm sure there's data there, seeing wasn't too bad so I can't use that as an excuse. Focusing should have been close too (although as you know with planetary stuff its hit and miss throughout a session). Just very frustrating I'm not seeing the level of detail that others are. I'm sure its partially technique and partially processing - both of which fall on my shoulders - so I need to try and find what I'm doing badly or not at all!

Will

[PhotoGav]

Phew, 1000 should be productive! When you find out how to properly process planetary pictures (try saying that quickly...), please let me know the secrets......

[Twisted Lip]

Haha, well I'm hoping during SGLX I can tap into someones knowledge (obviously yours for DS . There must be some planetary folk going who are kind enough to take pity on me lol

Hopefully new filters will be arriving this week so I can try and get some colour frames too (I think the red may show some more detail). Also worth noting I don't use a IR pass filter for the B&W stuff and everyone says that may bring out more detail/alleviate seeing conditions. Perhaps thats worth a shot but I think I may have overly spent this years astronomy budget in just this month already!

[Freddie]

Some detail hidden in there but as you say, quite a lot of noise. At that image scale you will be fine with 150 second AVIs (the blue I posted recently was 150 sec) so would get you ~6000 frames which will allow you to stack more frames to control the noise and hopefully a higher % of better quality ones captured during the longer duration AVI.

[Twisted Lip]

Some detail hidden in there but as you say, quite a lot of noise. At that image scale you will be fine with 150 second AVIs (the blue I posted recently was 150 sec) so would get you ~6000 frames which will allow you to stack more frames to control the noise and hopefully a higher % of better quality ones captured during the longer duration AVI.

Cheers Freddie, I'll give it a crack. The 1000 frame AVI's tend to be around 250Mg at that resolution but I'm used to 4Gb AVI's (at full resolution) for Solar stuff so there's no issue grabbing that volume of data. One thing I did notice is that the Grasshopper (whilst a great bit of kit), does run hot (19C the other night and it was very cold - in summer it can run up to 40C). I'm sure this is adding to the noise issue too.