Saturn 23-03-2012

[itlee]

this has taken a while for me to pluck up the courage to post this image as there are many good images out there, but finally I though "what the hell"...

So this is my first successfull image of Saturn, this was taken with the SPC900, 2x Barlow, 150mm Newt with manual tracking to produce a 1.5 minute video and then stacked 200 frames (possibly could have done more, but I didn't how to change it) with Registex6 and then I only tweeked the first 2 wavelets.

please be gentle with me...

Can someone explain how I can increase the size of the object without loosing definition, in post-processing?

itlee.

[Clayton]

Hi Itlee

Nice start

To increase scale it is better to use a stronger Barlow or extension tubes between the Barlow and the camera. At the moment Saturn (and Rings) is only covering about 40 pixels in your image so there is not a lot you can do with software to make it much bigger

I hope you don't mind me playing I have increased the size 200%, plus a RGB align and I think it is as far as I could go (perhaps too much )

Have you resized your image or simply cropped it??

[itlee]

I think I just cropped it. How do u do the RGB align?

With manual tracking I was unable to use a 3x Barlow, as it moved too fast across the screen for me to have time to focus

[Clayton]

I used CS3 to RGB align, but Registax has a button on the wavelets tab that will open a panel which has a button to do an estimate for you or you can do it manually with the same panel

A Polar aligned mount will help a lot with keeping the planet on the chip of the camera. It's very tough otherwise.

You can take 6min or more of video to work with and edit out the parts where Saturn drifts out of sight (or partly off screen) with something like Virtual Dub, that will help to get more frames to work with