Uranus 20/11/2016

Date of image 2011/2016.

Hardware details: Camera: Canon 550D in 640X480 movie crop mode 60fps. ISO 100 exposure 1/60s ISO 6400. Telescope: SW Skymax 150 MakCass. No filters were used and the camera was at prime focus. Mount: EQ5 Pro. The scope was focused using a Bahtinov mask on a bright star. Each frame was taken from about 4 minutes of video (~14400 frames).

Processing details: Pipp is used to convert .mov to avi and filter high quality frames (the best 2000 frames are retained). The converted movie is the processed in Registax with 1 alignment point. I use the Registergraph to keep only the frames within 100-90% of frame quality. I stack the frames with 2x drizzle (0.5 pixel). I then alter the first 3 wavelet settings (80.4, 20.2, 5.4) I then alter the gamma curve to 1.4.

Comments:

This is my first attempt at Uranus and overall I'm pretty pleased. I first tried to image the planet using a 2x Barlow but it was too dim and I could't see it reliably on the camera screen to keep it centred. I removed the Barlow and could image it fine. If I go for Neptune I think I will drop the frame rate and increase exposure since I cannot hope to get any detail apart from the planet's colour. The pale blue-green hue really makes this planet unmistakable. I thought I saw Titania as well, I did take some longer exposures just to see where Uranus was on the sensor. I may have picked up some of its moons there.