First light Jupiter DFK 618 !! Aug 19th

[Space Cowboy]

Just a quick sample from short 1 min avi. Lots more to process, netbook needs more RAM lol

60fps 1000 stack. Y800 debayered in registax.

[neil phillips]

Nice detail Stuart, put it on reg 6, go to colour balance press auto. theres a tad to much green and red. and not enough blue. if you go to reg and do the auto. you will see what i mean. its not a lot, but enough to stop it it looking white. other than that good start. why such a low frame count with 60 fps

[Space Cowboy]

Thanks Neil. It was actually too blue and has been auto balanced in reg 6. I agree it looks a tad yellow. This is a very rushed process hence using a short avi. Looks like the 3 min 10000+ avis will take hours to run through reg. Ordered 2gb Ram so hopeully will improve performance.

[neil phillips]

Strange i just run it through reg again and although it does look a bit blue ( could be because your shooting in approaching daylight ? ) i think the balance looks more neutral as can be seen by the white not greeny yellow clouds. Sounds like your having a hard time running on reg, yep 10.000 frames aint nothing. the advantage of using a 750GB pc over a laptop. more hassle getting it in and out of the garden but better for processing. your doing ok under the circumstances, get a colour image you feel happy about and use that as your guide when colour balancing. using the colour histogram on IC capture at the start is also much much better. im surprised by not using it, your colour balance wasnt way way off.

[eyepod]

Great image Stuart, i've been waiting to see these pics with the DFK and your auto dob. This is really convincing me to get one of these scopes instead of a 8" SCT.... keep those images coming...

jason

[Space Cowboy]

Thanks Neil that looks much better. Yeah it was too blue and I ran auto align but the blue went worse so then manually aligned the blue and then put it through auto balance and it came out that yellow shade.

Anyhow postie has just delivered RAM upgrade so may have a better chance processing the big avis lol

I had no idea there was a colour histogram so will have a look for that ready for next time. The green slider is not active is that correct?

Hopefully one of the 3 min runs will produce a 3-4000 stack less noisy more detailed image. I'd not even selected a proper reference frame on this one.

[Space Cowboy]

Cheers Jason! Hopefully this is just the tip of the iceberg!

[Jupiterholic]

Nice shot! you got some really good clarity on that little red spot! and awesome detail in the belts. Looks like you got this just after I closed my session this morning judging by the positioning of that spot. Cold out wasn't it? I noticed the dew making an unwelcome return aswell.

[eyepod]

What power barlow did you use for this stuart???

[neil phillips]

Yes sometimes reg gets it wrong stuart maybe by doing it twice on auto colour balance. corrected it im not sure. if that happens again and your colour balance is off just use this balance as a guide, likely i find green needs to go down, red slightly. and blue up slightly. when you see the whiter shades your getting closer.

And yes the histogram has no green slider, you just look at all 3 yellow bars. and put the red and blue sliders in a position where green is in the middle, so then they all look in line, it sounds complicated once you figure what i mean its dead easy. just muck about with the sliders, and look at what the yellow bars are doing, as you raise red, the red channel yellow bar will go up, same for blue. when they are all in line, with jupiter on the screen. jupiter will look white, which is why we are doing this.

Hope the Ram upgrade gets you sorted. good to see you with data, your doing good. i suspect a better avi will be coming, if you get any colour problems pm me, and we will work it together

[Space Cowboy]

Nice shot! you got some really good clarity on that little red spot! and awesome detail in the belts. Looks like you got this just after I closed my session this morning judging by the positioning of that spot. Cold out wasn't it? I noticed the dew making an unwelcome return aswell.

Thanks mate! Yes this was just before sunrise after some annoying thin patchwork cloud had finally cleared away (appeared after only 10 mins imaging and stayed for 20-30 mins until 5.40am.)

I used a 5x powermate thanks Jason.

Thanks for the colour balance info Neil!

[bm1980]

very nice, good image Stuart

Regards

Ben

[Clayton]

Lovely detail Stuart Have you tried Castrator to help speed up your processing ?? and help deal with your RAM problem

A quick and dirty colour fix is to stretch each colour individually to about 80%-90% of the histo, I find that a lot of the auto corrections go right to 100% and although technically are not burnt out they look as if they are in the highlights.

Nice to see your progress

[neil phillips]

Lovely detail Stuart Have you tried Castrator to help speed up your processing ?? and help deal with your RAM problem

A quick and dirty colour fix is to stretch each colour individually to about 80%-90% of the histo, I find that a lot of the auto corrections go right to 100% and although technically are not burnt out they look as if they are in the highlights.

Nice to see your progress

That is true Clayton though i did add a touch of extra luminence on this correction, the purely adjusted colour was much more in keeping with the original. which i thought was a tad dim. though on reflection. it might have been better to leave as is agreed

[AztecastroMcJ]

Excellent 1st light with new cam Stuart, very impressed

what u think to new cam, extra frames must be great benefit,

except for processing time, looking forward to seeing more

James

[Steve 1962]

Very nice images Stuart. Great start with the new camera. Keep 'em coming please.

Steve

[Space Cowboy]

Cheers Ben!

Thanks Clayton, yes I'm a craterlet veteran but even then the processing is slow going though extra RAM has now improved the situation a little. What made things grind to a halt was selecting too many alignment points in Reg 6. I'm going to use just one or two as there are always crazy paving cracks left behind by all the alignment points, very annoying and time consuming.

Cheers James! Bit overwhelmed with all the frames lol Cam looks good though 60fps seems very noisy (Gain was 850 about 65%) may try 30fps at a slower exposure and lower gain next time. Finding it very hard to sort the wheat from the chaff as each frame has so much noise. Processed 2 full length avis so far but no real imrovement on this short one.

I think seeing was pretty poor, worse than at first I realised. It seems the fast frame rate makes seeing look better than with a 10fps webcam. The annoying thing was after the cloud cleared at 5.40am seeing then went very unstable. I was planning to take a couple of comparison shots with the spc900 but the session was only 20-30 mins after losing half an hour to cloud.

Fingers crossed next time there will be more time to experiment with different frame rates and focal lengths. A shorter fl may have worked better on this occasion.

So frustrating the limited practise time we have because of the unreliable weather.

Will be interesting to compare your C11 images James assuming you are sticking with the webcam?

Thanks Steve!

[neil phillips]

Might also be worth trying reg 5 stuart, it shouldnt leave crazy paving using that. to speed up processing what about cropping the avi background on virtual dub and running it through reg, killing optimizing the bad frames. and making a new avi. im doing this on k3 might this speed things up. k3 also crops you can get a trial version for month stuart. ill explain how to crop, and optimize and create a new smaller avi. if you dont know how. just a suggestion. virtual dub i found can often slow reg down so not sure cropping on there will help. but might work ?

Colour cams are more noisy than mono no question. as jupiter gets brighter your cam is going to sing. me personally i wouldnt even be comparing a spc to this camera. this camera is far superiour. learn to use it well over time before you make any quick comparison judgements. ive used colour spcs mono spcs, toucam pros, dmks old and new. dfks dbks. imaging source win hands down in my opinion, if it does not. then there must be some other reason. wish you could send me a uncompressed avi. a large frame. best version. i would love to tinker

[Astroblagger]

lovely capture.

[beamish]

great start Stuart !!

As described, Castrator will be a big help. Will watch with interest how these colour cams get on.

[Space Cowboy]

Thanks for the info Neil! Processed all the avis on my old pc seemed to be faster than the netbook despite having lower spec.

Just used 1-4 alignment points in reg 6. I remember my best Saturn was using 4 alignments. For sure it would be interesting to see what you can produce from one of my avi's, not sure how to upload such a large file?

Thanks Astroblagger.

Cheers Karlo!

This seems to be the best image from the 19th taken at 5.59am, 30fps @ 1/61. 2 min avi 1000 stack from 3500.

[beamish]

I don't know about others but I am still finding that I can achieve better results by using Reg 5 for the stacking then moving the saved file over to 6 for wavelets

[Space Cowboy]

Its hard to tell which is best. Reg 6 is quicker for me.

[neil phillips]

when i get mosaic noise on reg 6 i switch to reg 5. i thought the detail looked less fine. but was only a gut reaction i didnt test this side by side ?

[rabbithutch]

Hi Stuart!

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