Jupiter and Mars

[mattytheshark]

Hi everyone,

Here are a couple of shots from Friday night.  The mars picture is my first attempt and is processed from 4000 frames.  The Jupiter pic is from 8000 frames using a 2x barlow.

I appreciate any advice!!  I want to tease some more detail out of Jupiter but I dont think the seeing was great to be honest.  All help gratefully received as always.

[Stargazer33]

First of all Matt, nice captures.   Well done for your first capture of Mars too!

Seeing can make a real difference to your capture video. How did you focus? It looks like it may be a little soft to me. Using a Bahtinov mask and focusing on a nearby star is a good idea. Also did you stack every frame from your video or just select the best, say, 5%. If you are stacking every frame that could effect your final image. I'm sure you could pull out more detail if you used a program like Photoshop or the freeware GIMP.

I imaged Mars on the 8th (opposition) and the seeing here was awful. the final stack - best 5% from a 3 minute video - wasn't that good either. Playing with curves and colour balance in Photoshop got a half descent image. I used a C8 XLT, 2.5x barlow and a SPC900NC web cam. The thing with PS and GIMP is to do more smaller adjustments than one big adjustment. As long as you don't overwrite your original file you can go back and keep trying different things until you get an image you like.

[mattytheshark]

Hi Bryan,

I did use a bahtinov mask prior to imaging although I was a little puzzled by the diffraction pattern I got with the barlow attached (it looked a bit different to usual)

The Jupiter image uses 5% of the 8000 frames so I suppose it must be seeing? What do you think?  

I'm hoping my scope is collimated well because I dont fancy messing with it!

[mattytheshark]

Another thought. Could the soft appearance be something to do with the exposure times? I can't remember what it was set at but could this be a problem?

Is there anything else I should be trying?