Roy Foreman

Excellent 

Oh for some clear steady skies so I can have a go at Saturn.  Not that my result will be as good as yours. Nice image considering its low altitude.

Very nice image. Lots of detail and just the right amount of sharpness.

Great image, excellent detail and colour. No clear skies for me for a while.

3 hours ago, JonHigh said:

Hi Roy. Very nice image. When I shot Jupiter I use a very small ROI and could just about see Jupiter so very underexposed when capturing using my ASI585. Definitely, the smaller the ROI the fast the frame rate. 8bit Raw, 2-3mins at 252 gain. I also use PIPP then AS3 then Registax, RGB align, colour balance and wavelets. I never got Drizzle to work very well in AS3!!

20_09_08_pipp_lapl5_ap28 piipp.tiff 2.75 MB · 2 downloads

 

Thank you for that info Jon, very useful to know. From my lunar imaging experience, I discovered that high frame rate has less impact on final quality than short integration times and greater number of frames. My lunar camera trundles along at 19fps max !

For Jupiter, I was using gain of 100 to 150, so maybe I could up that a bit.

For my next attempt, I am going to try using a cooled camera with reduced ROI,  as I know I can use a gain of 400 plus if need be. If I can get the integration time down to 5ms, it would go a long way to beating the seeing.

Watch this space ...   

Excellent - particularly the detail on Ganymede !

1 hour ago, geoflewis said:

Nicely done Roy

Thank you. A bit softer than I would have liked but the seeing was pretty poor.

Still new to planetary imaging but hopefully the learning curve will flatten before too long.

Turbulent conditions, and captured between passing clouds as usual.

Still experimenting with various combinations of settings etc.

10" f/12 Classical Cssegrain

ZWO 224 mc

15% of 5000 frames at 64fps

Stacked in AS3

Processed in Photoshop.

I too saw the GRS for the first time last night. Have yet to process my images but I doubt they will be as good as yours. Excellent work.

2 hours ago, Bugdozer said:

I have Lightroom, so I will have to investigate trying that. 

I discovered why I was getting artefacts when stacking. The poor seeing was causing distortions between images. In one frame a crater would be a perfect circle, in another it would be slightly squashed vertically, in another it would be slightly squashed horizontally. The stacking seemed to be able to correct for this in a small area but across the whole image it doesn't seem to be possible - getting one bit lined up means another bit looks out of position. I don't see how I can correct for this unless the software can somehow "warp" the image to compensate. 

That is the advantage of software like autostakkert  - it examines all areas of each frame a selects the best bits from each, so distortions are reduced or eliminated. In reality it is more complex than than, but you get the idea.

And it is free to download.

I think Lightroom has layers so if you are doing a mosaic the individual panes can be put on layers and blended at the joins to get a perfect match.

Lots to learn and it all takes practise, but there are loads of people here on SGL ready and willing to assist.

Good luck !

Excellent images. Raises the bar for fledgling planetary imagers like me to aim for !

19 minutes ago, Kon said:

I think 2min is ok and you could combine your 3 captures in Winjupos.

By the way, 64fps seems low for this camera. What settings did you use for your capture? A small ROI will give you a much higher FPS too.

I used gain 100 and 8ms. Frames were quite a bit under exposed, so really a longer IT is required. As this was a first attempt I used the full imaging area, but you are right of course, a smaller ROI will help.

17 minutes ago, Kon said:

Very nice Roy. It has a nice natural look to it. (I feel you might be able to tease a few more details. Worth trying Astrosurface.). I never got drizzle to work well to get more out of my images.

Thank you and yes I am sure there is more detail to be had. It took about 2 minutes to capture 5000 frames and I did 3 runs in succession. I noticed the features moving  between each run, so I'm wondering if the disc rotation is blurring the details a bit. Maybe a shorter imaging run would help. Thanks for your advice.

1 hour ago, geoflewis said:

Very nice first attemp Roy. The main features are showing and colour balance is good, but detail is a little soft. Did you apply RGB alignment, as the moons in particular are showing some prism like dispersion?

Thank you. No I didn't do RGB alignment, but I will try it. I have an ADC which may have helped but not enough inward focus travel with an inline electric focusser attached. Thanks for your advice, much appreciated.

Been doing DSO imaging all my life.  When the moon dominates the sky I switch to lunar, but until now never tried planetary mainly because the little sods have been so low in the sky for so many years.

So this year, now that Jupiter and Saturn have risen above the treetops, I've had a go. I actually did Saturn first but it turned out rubbish so in the trash it went.  This is Jupiter and I'm quite pleased for a first attempt.

Scope was a 10" F/12 Classical Cassegrain at prime focus - 3045mm

Camera was a ZWO ASI 224 MC

50% of 5000 frames at 64fps.

Stacked in AS3 with 3x drizzle

Processed in Photoshop - just sharpening, clarity and noise reduction.

Any comments or pointers on how to do it better will be much appreciated.

Thanks for looking.

Not bad for single frames.

Autostakkert is great for stacking images. Easy to use and produces great results. You can download it for free. Not tried it with DSLR raw frames but I think it will read them ok. Try to get a minimum of 20 frames per image.  As for stitching them together, any photo editing software that supports layers will do it. Photoshop is expensive, but lightroom is much cheaper and should do the job.  It is a bit of a faff and requires care and patience.

Clear skies were promised but I only got a couple of hours of hazy sky before the clouds rolled in. Nothing new there, then.

This was a 12 pane mosaic of the whole moon, but problems with differential clarity between the panes precludes me from posting it here - just not good enough to be proud of !

However, here are some selective enlargements from the bits that did blend together successfully.

Vital Stats :-

10" F/12 Classical Cassegrain - 3045mm focal length

ZWO ASI 183MM

Proplanet 642 IR filter

30% of 2000 frames at 19 fps

Processed in AS3 and Photoshop.

Hope they are of interest.

6 hours ago, Bugdozer said:

These are fantastic, Roy! Can I ask what scope/camera/processing technique you are using?

Thank you and glad you like my images. Scope was a Celestron 9.25 xlt and camera was a ZWO 183mm. This is a 20mpx camera with quite a large chip, but a top frame rate of only 19fps. File sizes are huge and require a high end PC to process. 

I take 2000 Frames for each pane and usually stack the best 30% in AS3.

The rest is done in photoshop as follows :-

set black and white points

Sharpen 500/1/0

Camera raw clarity +30

Noise XT at 70/20

Final tweaks to brightness and contrast.

The settings for sharpening and NXT will vary considerably depending on pixel size and image resolution, but these are what I use for my setup.

Hope this helps and guides you in your own imaging.

Cheers

Roy

Very nice rendition.

Nice image. With regard to the core I have found that the only way is to do shorter subs and blend the two together. A bit time consuming but I'm sure there are plenty of tutorials around on how best to fo it.

Love the billowy brown clouds of dust against the red reflection nebula. Great capture.

These two targets are on my to-do list, though I doubt I'll clock up as many hours as you have done.  Quite impressive and an excellent image.

Love the dust, and subtle shades of blue. Great shot.

25 minutes ago, WolfieGlos said:

Ive heard good things about the MN190, this gives me more reason to think perhaps I should have gone for one too, but would require a mount upgrade sadly. For such a short total time that’s really impressive! 

We did get the clear skies here last night, no showers but some cloud patches. Supposed to be again tonight 🤞

I too had heard good reports of the MN190 but was put off by it not being able to cover a full frame sensor.  I gather that current models have a larger secondary mirror, and when I saw a couple of images taken using full frame , that was the tipping point for me.

I don't know what mount you currently have, but the MN190 will be ok on and EQ6.  Not that I've tried it, but my 10" Quattro works with that mount and the MN190 is a lighter scope.

As for short integration time, I get so few clear skies that I've learned to process images to extract as much out of limited data that I can. Case of having to.  When I see images taken over 10, 20 or even 30 hours I think 'It would take me years to gather that much data !'

Thanks

Roy

Clear skies were promised for last night.  I got cloud and showers with a few clear bits in between. Grabbed some images in those clear interludes.  It really was a case of take one or two frames, hit pause which the clouds billowed past, then another one or two frames, and so on.  Took several hours to gather just 25 minutes of data on each image.  The stuff we have to contend with these days.

I have to say I am really impressed with this 190mm Mak-Newt.  One or two minor issues still to sort, but image quality is very impressive.  A couple of my other scopes have now become surplus to requirements !

Skywatcher MN190

ZWO ASI 6200 full frame OSC

IDAS NB1 Tri band filter

25 x 60 sec at gain 400

Thanks for looking.