geoflewis

Honestly that's been one of my biggest struggles recently. For the final version of my Jupiter image from 1 Dec, I tried something that I picked up from one of Damian Peach's Patreon tutorials, which was to layer a blurred version on top of the fully sharpened version in Affinity Photo (Damian uses Photoshop, but the principle is the same), then use the opacity slider to blend the two to taste. I then used some regional sharpening to bring back the detail in selected parts of the image, e.g. the northern polar region, whilst leaving the equatorial regions softer. This approach seemed to strike that balance between detail and smoothness that I'd been stuggling to obtain.

I went out a bit later last night with fog thickening. The seeing looked good, but I was too late as the fog rapidly turned to cloud. Was that with the 290MM, I haven’t used mine for over a year now, I just go with the 462MC.

They’re both excellent images. As Kostas suggests, adjusting the LD value might help, but I’m also wondering whether there was a bit of time gap between some of the captures meaning a lack detail in that region when derotating in WinJupos.

That’s superb Harvey, smooth as cream with lots of detail. It’s one of the things I love about planetary vs DSO imaging, you only need a fairly brief gap, in good seeing to get what you need for an excellent image.

Thanks Harvey

Thanks David, So what colour rosette do I get?

Thanks, I knew that I had good data, but was struggling to get the best from it. I think I got there in the end though 🤞

Thanks Stuart, Yes, tantalising is a good way to describe it. Unfortuantely I only have the IR742 filter. Kostas said he'd lend me one of his, but I'm not keen on borrowing gear and can't justify buying a filter for what would be almost a single project. It's a bit like my reluctance to buy a UV filter just for Venus.

That's great to know, thanks Stuart. I don't have a large monitor, so do all my processing on a 15" laptop screen, which presents it's own challenges when looking for noise, etc.

Thanks Stuart

Thanks Kostas and likewise I have found our discussions both stimulating and educational.

After a lot of versions, discussions and feedback from members, especially @Kon and @Space Cowboy, I've settled on this result for my recent Jupiter image, now annotated for submission to John Rogers, BAA Jupiter section director. After lots of experimentation, including trying to match Damian Peach's colour balance, which even included me sharing one of my versions with Damian, for whch his feedback was excellent data for the UK, but too yellow, so in the end I've pretty much gone back to my usual colours. Sorry if any of you are tired seeing yet another version, but I wanted to share the final image, hence a separate thread. Thanks for looking.

I think SharpCap is very good, I bought it last year for something else, but I'm long in the tooth with FireCapture for planetary imaging, so see no reason to change that habit. That said, I have seen reports of SharpCap having an excellent live stacking focus aid, so maybe.....🤔

Thanks Kostas, I could ask 'she who must be obeyed', but I might not live to report the answer.....😱

Following feedback from @Space Cowboy and discussion with @Kon I took a look at Damian Peach's processing of Jupiter from his redcent trip to La Palma. You can see an example on his website here. I decided to reprocess both the original image in this thread, plus my image from 25 Nov 2023, with a view to trying to match Damian's colour palette and if possible obtain a similar balance of detail and smoothness. Of course I can't match the detailed capture from a mountain top in the canaries using a 0.5m scope, but I tried my best. The colour palette is quite different to what I usually produce, but hopefully is similar to Damian's and other's that I have seen published. I am interested to hear what folks think about these latest versions please.

Thanks. It is definitely possible as I've seen a couple of other version just from the UK, but it certainly ain't easy. I had a few failed attempts and even several failed attempts with the same data from which I generated this attempt. I want to try some different capture settings and go even longer, maybe over 2 hours data, to see if I can get a clearer/cleaner result.

Peter, The C14 really comes into it's own when the seeing is excellent, but in poor seeing it can yield poorer results than smaller scopes. I had some good results with my previous 10" Meade Lx200 and older inferior cameras from very light polluted skies when I lived in NW Surrey. Also see what @Konis achieving with his manual 8" dob. Nevertheless, poor seeing will kill almost everythng planetary imaging wise, so in the UK it's a case of try, try and try again.

Thanks Kostas, your help has been truly invaluable, not only on this challenge, but processing tecniques and capture details for the other planets.

If you were in focus and couldn't see any moons then maybe you weren't looking at Jupiter.... Even a very poorly collimated scope would probably still show Jupiter's moons, but not if it was out of focus.

Were you able to see any of Jupiter's 4 Gallilean moons. They are easily revealed even in binoculars, so you should be able to see those. If you can't then I think that maybe you weren't properly focused.

So after not getting Neptune on 1 Dec 2023, but some nice captures of Saturn and later Jupiter, I concentrated on my lastest goal to capture Uranus ring system. I captured 44 x 2m SERs using 40ms exposures with the ASI462MC camera through an Astronomic IR742 Pro Planet filter. I processed each SER for best 70% in AS3! (actually I tried 10%,25%, 50%, 70%, 80%), then ran them through WinJupos measurement and derotation. Aggresive gain and offset settings, in Astrosurface, combined with wavelets and deconvolution revealed what appears as an oval ring feature along with Uranus 4 main moons (again huge thanks to Kostas @Kon who showed me how to use the offset and gain settings in Astrosurface to reveal the halo / rings around Uranus). At this long elapsed duration (1.5 hours), WinJupos shows the moons as arcs rather than points and of course Uranus is completely blown out. I next used the SETI Uranus Viewer to generate an image of the ring system and main moons for the same time stamp as the derotated midpoint of my image, which I overlayed in Affinity Photo by aligning Uranus and it's moons. The below video is a screen recording as I change the opacity of the SETI overlay to show how well it aligns with the oval ring feature in my image. Affinity Photo 2023-12-03 12-53-59.mp4 At worst I think I can say it's an interesting attempt (it's definitely my best attempt yet), but who thinks that I can actually claim to have captured Uranus's rings? I have some colour data too (just for Uranus), so my my current challenge is working out how to combine the IR and colour images, together with the stretched 'rings' version and overlay them together in a single snapshow image - not sure if that is even possible.... 🤔

Excellent images and animations.

Yes, but still looks a bit yellow. Details look good so you haven't over sharpened.

Well done, it doesn't look over processed, but what is causing that blue background, as it rather detracts from the image. Jupiter looks a bit yellow, but that may be the background playing with my eyes.

Thanks, well Neptune does have rings, but Saturn wins that contest hands down.