How does "bad seeing" manifest itself?

[ScubaMike]

I have not enough experience to determine what is "bad seeing" and what is bad technique.

I have a number of videos taken, with the intention of using registax to combine then to try and produce a reasonable image (planetary).

I have some "wobble" of the images, is this bad technique? to much vibration? or "bad seeing"?

I'm managing to get some reasonable (in my beginners eyes) video of Jupiter - shows cloud banding), but should I wait until Jupiter is higher in the sky? (sems to be a bit better the higher Jupiter is), although I can't tell if I'm just geting a little bit better with more practice.

It was my intention to start with the moon & work up, but as the moon doesn't rise until nearly dawn, I thought I'd try Jupiter.

I'm hoping to get a bit better with practice in time for when the moon is up during darkness.

Kind regards,

Mike

[Domis]

It' usually best that the object is high in the sky,but you can still get some very good images at lower altitudes when seeing is good. For Jupiter, keep your captures to no more than about 1,000 frames but take several captures and check and adjust focus often and between captures. Jupiter rotates so quickly on it's axis that too many frames will cause error which Registax can't handle while aligning and stacking resulting in a poor image. You may want to vary your settings slightly for each capture also. When you load into Registax,go through your frames and deselect any bad ones, allowing registax to only stack the better ones. This should leave you with about a 600 to 700 frame stack and should produce a very good result. The "wooble" is most likely atmosheric disturbance and poses no problem for registax to do it's work. Focus is key to a good image,any time you spend tweaking it will pay off big time at the end result. Hope this helps. Good luck.

[ollypenrice]

I agree with Domis. Jupiter is low for me at the moment so it is very low for you in Yorkshire!

If you look at the stars next time you're out you'll almost certainly see the lower ones scintillating while the higher ones look stable. That's the problem. I'm not a planetary imager but what the experts like is good seeing, often at the expense of good transparency. In other words a slight haze can be good for them because it brings stability.

Olly

[Earl]

I think the easiest way to detect bad seeing is image stability.

If its rippletastic the seeing is bad.