Focusing in tricks

[Ryan Anderson]

I was wondering if there are any tips or tricks when it came to focusing on on planets? I'm able to focus in pretty good, but I'm unable to make them crystal clear. I'll post my best picture of Jupiter for reference, but I'm just curious if there's something I could be doing better or something I'm not doing.

[kendg]

Capture video and use registax to process it. Very difficult if not impossible to get crystal clear single images.

[ronin]

Likely not possible or at least not easy to get a good image of Jupiter at this time, it is just too low to the horizon and you will be attempting to get an image through a lot of unstable atmosphere. Also New York half suggests City and that adds in lots of thermals rising from buildings.

As Ken says the way to go is a webcam and video. You get a video of say 1000 frames = about 30 seconds at 30 fps. Load these into Registax, then you identify the "best" frame. Not sure if Registax helps in this now. Once you find a good one you tell Registax to pick (say) the best 200 that match it. You then tell Registax to stack these 200 frames into one and you do a little fairly simple processing at least initially simple processing. The "simplest" being to move the "Wavelets" bars on the Left towards the centre and see what changes for the better. OK it gets more complex but that would make improvements.

The idea behind it is that in the 1000 frames the atmosphere etc may have been good enough for enough instances of about 0.03sec to enable say 1 in 4  good frames and it is these good frames that you use. The blurry not good ones you throw away.

As additional onfo it seems that people use Astrokaart 2 and Registax as a pair. One does one aspect better then the other. I THINK that it is AS2 for stacking and Registax for processing. MAy be easier to just stick to one for now and I am not exactly sure which is the first used.

Both the above are free software, which helps.

 

[D4N]

Yep AS2 has great stacking functions and registax has really nice processing functions.

You may also need to use PIPP if the stacking software doesn't like your video file.

Remember with Jupiter to keep the individual sequences short as the planet rotates rapidly so you start to lose detail if your video is more than a couple of minutes.