First Images of Saturn

[Corkeyno2]

I have a Celestron Nexstar 4sE 4 inch telescope, and a celestron neximage 5 with registax 6.1. Here are my first ever attempts at capturing Saturn:

Terrible, I know. Are there any ways I can make this better?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Corkey

[Art Gecko]

Well done Corkey, Saturn is not an easy one to capture with a small apeture scope, can you give us more info on how you got these images... are they single frames or stacked?... I haven't done planetary imaging for a while, but last time I went for jupiter I took video footage of it (3 x 30second videos) then put all the individual frames from the .MOV file into the stacking software and stacked 1600 of the highest quality frames... with a bit of tweaking and stretching I was able to bring out some detail... With a 4 inch apeture, you're not going to get much detail on the planet surface, but you could possibly get the cassini division if you try that method.

HTH, Art.

[Corkeyno2]

The second image is 360 frames stacked on each other, and the first is 1500 frames stacked on top of each other. It was pretty blurry because Saturn was quite low on the horizon.

[Stub Mandrel]

The top image needs RGB alignment, do that (in registax, for example) and it will look way better.

[Corkeyno2]

Thanks alot! I will try that right now and post the results.

[Corkeyno2]

Is this any better? I tried the RGB Align and some other features too.

[Stub Mandrel]

Yes, better, a bit of noise reduction in the wavelets tab might polish the final result, maybe play with the colour balance too.  Experiment and have fun working out what all eh toys in regi do!*

 

*Let me know if you find out!

[Art Gecko]

try an unsharp mask too... it'll help bring definition to your image, but don't go too hard on it!!