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Venus and Jupiter Tonight


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I think I am finally learning to focus properly... Venus emerged from a swirling cloud and actually had a decent edge on the screen, it was incredible how a tiny tweak made a world of difference. When io became a pin-point, I knew I had cracked it.

Jupiter and Io

Jupiter And Io 29 april

Venus

Venus

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I'm starting to get a 'workflow sequence' sorted out:

Sharpcap 2.5 to get the video, in 20-second suns each giving me about 60-80 usable frames.

PIPP to join, centre them and crop. I use stretch histogram and quality selection (sometimes) set to a high percentage (say 90%).

I stack in Astrostakkert, and use it to do the quality guided by the histogram - sometimes 90% gives better results than 10%, sometimes not. I don't drizzle anymore as this causes fine artefacts in registax.

In registax I just do wavelets and gamma, trying to max detail. I might use bright side deringing. I struggle to understand how some (many) features of registax work.

Sometimes I use Corel Photoshop (very old version 10) usually the unsharp mask and gamma or tone curve which work better than in registax, but can also tweak the colour etc.

Still wondering if it would be 'cricket' to turn Io yellow instead of the green it came out in...

ll very different to what I would normally do to a photo - usually just careful tweak to gamma and hue changes if their is a colour cast.

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A very nice couple of images great to hear you are getting to grips with the focus. I think i would probably try and capture Venus a little dimmer though it looks a little over exposed, hopefully you will get a better shape to the phase.

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A very nice couple of images great to hear you are getting to grips with the focus. I think i would probably try and capture Venus a little dimmer though it looks a little over exposed, hopefully you will get a better shape to the phase.

Have to agree, but the Microsoft camwas on minimum exposure AND brightness. Perhaps blanking off part of the scope? I haven't got any (small) neutral filters.

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Great images!

For the Jupiter shot, I'd have a try with the 'RGB align' tool in Registax - you can see some splitting of colours around Io and the edge of Jupiter, and you could very likely improve that by shifting the RGB alignment. You could probably bring Io to being a nice white point! Awesome that you caught the shadow transit - I haven't been fortunate enough to do that yet.

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Thanks Meryck. Jupiter doesn't improve with RGB align, but I brightened Io and then RGB aligned it and it became a bit sharper and less green, but it also lost some shape. I'm a bit wary of over-processing what is really just a big dot as I think I could make it almost any size and colour with the right tweaks...

I have gone back to some of my first images and reprocessed them and there is more detail there, but I fear my Jupiter images approach saturation bombing so I'll hold back for some genuinely better ones now.

Went back to the Venus footage and tried using PIPPs pre-processing to drop the gamma to 0.9 on all frames. Still not perfect by aggressive sharpening can now be done and it shows more of a colour gradient. Sometimes you need others to criticise the pic so you can go back and tweak it. I tend to see ANY change as an improvement then compare versions side by side and discover the earlier ones were better... but i think this is the most I will get out of that venus run. i hope to get some nice crescents later

Venus 4

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