Kon

The weather has been atrocious recently and I had not been out at night in a while. Despite the lingering thin clouds, Jupiter looked exceptionally stable. I am surprised on the amount of details that I managed in colour. The IR looked pretty excellent during the captures. If it weren't for the clouds, it would have been one of the best sessions. 8" Dob, manual, asi 462mc and 462mm, 2.5x TV powermate, UV/IR cut or IR pass.

I got up and it was all cloudy, and straight back to bed. I tried Venus during lunchtime yesterday but it was awful again in UV (IR was a marginally better). Although the jetstream is further north, it is killing the seeing. Let's hope November is better.

I know the feeling. I was out this lunch time to try Venus but it was just awful. Even on the eyepiece it was boiling. I am contemplating if I should stay up for Jupiter or not tonight. I will check Saturn and see how bad it is....

Nice widefield image Stuart. Some details are coming through despite the conditions.

Thank you all for your kind comments. I must say I have learned a lot about planetary processing from this forum including critical eyes!

For those that followed my Venus captures earlier this year, the final composite that I made has been published in several astronomy magazines (Astronomy, Astronomy Now, Astrosurf and Sterne und Weltraum). I am really chuffed that Editors found my work worth including in their magazines as standards are so high. I was over the moon when they sent me the magazines and a couple had a whole page dedicated to it. ZWO did an interview on my Venus captures too (https://astronomy-imaging-camera.com/astrobio/astrophotographers-story-konstantinos-beis/). I am over the moon considering I have only been doing this for less than 2 years.

In my eyes a lot more details and more natural looking. AS is a nice program but as we discussed sometimes Registax has the edge especially on mono data, or at least on my hands I can pull more details. It doesn't mean we should dismiss it but experiment with both (that's more a comment for newcomers reading this thread).

Very nice Maurizio. Yes I mostly use Astrosurface and Gimp these days as well. Your processing is always spot on so it is nice to see a similar result to mine. I tent to resized my images to 120% but I think the original capture size is preserving more of the details (I do not think you have resized here).

An interesting upcoming article in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06672-7

Thanks Stuart. I am trying to take the best bits of each program. I am having some offline chat with Geof about Astrosurface. I have the links and video you sent me on IA that I can forward to Geof.

Thanks Maurizio. Yes the manual has its challenges but it shows that it is possible to get decent images even with 8". I agree with Geof that your derotation has better details. Unfortunately UK skies prevents me from experimenting too much as usually 1 or 2 captures are decent to do further. I might try the video derotation on the image above and see how it looks.

Very nice image. Very nice fine details. Do you find video derotation better than the tiff derotation?

The amount of junk overhead is rather worrying.

I would have though the paracorr to be more beneficial for DSO as the planets drift fairly quickly from the sides (I am sure as!3 sorts these if there is an issue). An ADC would be better but again hard on manual (looking to diy a platform when I have some time).

Sad face for the clouds. I am eager to get out but Jetstream is looking awful. The weekend is looking promising. Thanks for the image. It looks nice and better than my derotated attempt last night. I was introduced to imageanalyzer by Stuart. Worth a play. It has several nice features.

Thanks for the processing. Looks nice. Good tips on capture but with the 462 I haven't been too worried about noise. Even close to maxing the gain on methane or UV captures I can manage the noise ok. I may have been a bit conservative here. Regarding metaguide I have read about it but I am not sure how easy it will be with my manual dob. I will give it a try. I always check collimation by star test before capture and I think it is more of focusing in this case. I have just upgraded to a dual focuser.

Thanks Geof. Sorry, I flip them before Winjupos for orientation, I should have done it before uploading here. I let Winjupos measure and adjust accordingly. You can use Io as a guide at the bottom left too. Regarding Astrosurface, I am finding it a lot better these days. On the 358 image, I can't reproduce these details even with hard pushing in registax. When I am back on my laptop I will message you a screenshot of my initial parameters at least for this image. I also did a mild sharpening too in Astrosurface. I like the denoise on Astrosurface too but somehow colour denoise is a bit aggressive and I use imageanalyzer. I tend to throw a bit of the best features of each software to get to the final image. I also tried x1.5 drizzle in as!3 but it didn't improve things too much, similar to your experience.

The fact that it's a mag ~2 is awful. Late October it will have some high passes, looks like a slower iss. Check on heavens above site.

Thanks Geof. Yes I tried a bit more processing; I tried two ways. 1. tiny wavelets in Registax and then in winjupos and then back to Registax/Astrosurface. 2. Nearly done in registax but I found that i could not push more after winjupos. I am happy to share the images. These are the two best ones straight after as!3. The 358 capture is the one reprocessed, although the 400 should be as good but winjupos made a softer output. 2023-09-09-0358_4-Jupiter_pipp_lapl4_ap288.tif2023-09-09-0400_8-Jupiter_pipp_lapl5_ap171.tif

Yes awful. The fact that it is a naked eye bright object is quite alarming. I don't know if more will be launched but it is worrying.

Spot on and that's what I noticed after a careful analysis of all the tiffs. looking forward to the software but I though it already exists and it is called ticket to Barbados!🤣

Sorry, I should have said I stacked a 120s video capture; the capture has around 25000 frames. In this instance I used 50%, 12500 frames to make the tiff above. My exposure was 5ms. Do not worry about the gain as we have different cameras; what you are aiming is to have a histogram of 50-70%. Once you have the exposure set, then play with the gain to bring it to that level. Derotation can help and it certainly helped when I was doing the Venus captures back in June. The other images where a bit softer that did not help with derotation. Pointed by Geof and Stuart above too.

The first 3 of the stack where 'softer' compared to the last two after careful inspection, but somehow the ladt two where very similar but derotation did not help (they were sharper pre-winjupos). I derotate the tiffs. I have never derotated a video. Much of an advantage?

Thanks Mark. The main difference is that this image is a stack of 120s rather than derotation of 5x120s. Even derotating the best 2x120s was giving a softer result; still better than the original but the finer details are better on the single stack.

Thanks Maurizio. I suppose cloudy nights are good for revisiting nice data.