Planetary imaging....newbie questions :)

[Tim]

Just got myself a DMK au618.as mono camera.

I plan to take some lunar an planetary pics with it from time to time, and some solar shots.

Just have a few questions regarding the settings and stuff.

Scopes it will be used with are a C11 Edge, C9.25, and Skywatcher 150ED.

Are there special filters for planetary images? Or will normal LRGB ones do? Do you even need a Luminance filter run?

How many frames is it reasonable to acquire per channel for a decent result?

In the capture software, what is the single most important thing to get right? Frame rate, gain, exposure length?

I use Avistack 2.0 to stack the images, just cant seem to make head nor tail of Registax, but is there a good easy to follow guide to getting the best out of it anywhere?

Anything else I've missed?

Thanks very much.

Tim

Oh this is last nights Saturn, the best I could do so far with the 150ED and a cheap 2x barlow. Any tips? The post processing seems to be a whole new game over normal deep sky images

[Freddie]

Your LRGB filters will be fine, though I find no need to use the L. You want to be stacking ~1000 per colour so capture as many as you can. For Saturn I was capturing 2.5 min AVIs per colour at 10-15fps so ~1800 frames captured. You are going to need to balance gain and exposure to control noise but keep the exposure time as low as possible. The frame rate will take care of itself. Once you have processed your 3 colours, your best bet is to have a look at winJupos to combine them.

Hope that has been of some help.

[Tim]

Process each colour separately?

[Freddie]

Yep, completely process each colour, stack, wavelets, any adjustments in PS and then use WinJupos to combine the three. You should then only need some minor fine tuning (if any) in PS to get the final image.

[Tim]

Wavelets :s

Any tips?