Is this Saturn pic any good for this time of year?

[Jojo204]

Hi all,

I have a Nexstar 6SE and am using an unmodded 1200d. Is this pic any good for this time of year, close to Bristol, UK? I am new to planetary imaging and kind of hoped it would be a bit bigger, or I could maybe make out the Cassini division. I know it's not very good this year as the planets are very low. In a few years when they are higher up, will I be able to make out more detail?

Thanks!

[astrosathya]

Its good for a beginners image. Here's what you could do to imrpove it.

1) Wait until it rises to almost right above your head, or as high as it can get.

2) Use cropped video mode on your camera, this way you'll also get the highest frame rate. This will help you with Lucky Imaging, that is getting those tiny good moments between air turbulence.

3) Take a video for about 1 to 1.5 minutes.

4) Use a Barlow of good quality, preferably an ED Barlow.

 

[Paul73]

Given that Saturn barely gets above the horizon at the moment, anything that clearly shows a disc and the rings is a good result! You are shooting through a lot of wobbly light polluted atmosphere when it is that low.

Is this a single frame? If so try stacking multiple frames. I’m new to imaging so I’ll leave it to the experts to advise on stacking.  

Paul

[Jojo204]

2 hours ago, astrosathya said:

Its good for a beginners image. Here's what you could do to imrpove it.

1) Wait until it rises to almost right above your head, or as high as it can get.

2) Use cropped video mode on your camera, this way you'll also get the highest frame rate. This will help you with Lucky Imaging, that is getting those tiny good moments between air turbulence.

3) Take a video for about 1 to 1.5 minutes.

4) Use a Barlow of good quality, preferably an ED Barlow.

 

Thank you, yes the turbulence was very noticable with my 2X Barlow. It was a short 5 secondish video. 

[Jojo204]

1 hour ago, Paul73 said:

Given that Saturn barely gets above the horizon at the moment, anything that clearly shows a disc and the rings is a good result! You are shooting through a lot of wobbly light polluted atmosphere when it is that low.

Is this a single frame? If so try stacking multiple frames. I’m new to imaging so I’ll leave it to the experts to advise on stacking.  

Paul

Thank you! It is a short 5 second video, stacked in Autostakkert 2. Registax crashed when trying to stack it so. 

I will wait until they get higher!

[Cosmic Geoff]

I would suggest using a dedicated planetary camera e.g. a ASI120MC and cropping to 320x240 pixels to boost the frame rate. Take a video of several thousand frames and set the stacker to use the best 20% or so.  Also use an atmospheric dispersion corrector (ADC) to counteract the dispersion which gives some colour fringing in your image. As a cheap but inferior alternative to an ADC, try adjusting the red & blue alignment in the processing software.

If it's any consolation, a lot of my Saturn images don't show the division in the rings clearly either.

Seeing is also a major factor, so keep trying.

[Starwiz]

On 18/05/2019 at 00:21, Cosmic Geoff said:

I would suggest using a dedicated planetary camera e.g. a ASI120MC and cropping to 320x240 pixels to boost the frame rate. Take a video of several thousand frames and set the stacker to use the best 20% or so.

Just as an example, I took this one three years ago from the car park at Westonbirt Arboretum, so also not far from Bristol.

It was taken a few days before opposition, but even so, Saturn only reached a maximum elevation of just over 10 degrees.  I imaged it a couple of hours before it reached it's maximum height, so it would have been below 10 degrees elevation at the time.

SW200p with the ASI120mc camera and captured a couple of thousand frames, stacking only around 20% of the best.  The division can be seen so I was very happy with it considering the low elevation.

John

[Chefgage]

On 17/05/2019 at 08:37, astrosathya said:

Its good for a beginners image. Here's what you could do to imrpove it.

1) Wait until it rises to almost right above your head, or as high as it can get.

 

 

The problem here in the UK is planets do not get very high in the sky.  A typical example is Saturn only reaching about 15 degrees maximum  altitude at my Location at this time of year. It will be roughly the same for the OP. 

I see you have your location as India. I bet you have the planets appear at a very high altitude. We do not get that here in the UK.

[Vox45]

I had the same scope in 2015 and I was able to get this from Paris using a cheap webcam and these settings:

[Philips SPC 900NC PC Camera]
Frame Divisor=1
Resolution=640x480
Frame Rate (fps)=10.00
Colour Space=YUY2
Exposure=-4
Brightness=56
Contrast=32
Saturation=72
Gamma=0
ColorEnable=255
BacklightCompensation=0
Gain=40

You say you took a 5sec video, that would be around 100 frames correct ?

I took : Total input frames: 1505   Frames discarded by quality: 705  Total output frames: 800. So maybe taking a longer video and using PIPP and  Autostakkert 2 with more frames to work with.

Edited May 24, 2019 by Vox45

[Jojo204]

On ‎17‎/‎05‎/‎2019 at 23:21, Cosmic Geoff said:

I would suggest using a dedicated planetary camera e.g. a ASI120MC and cropping to 320x240 pixels to boost the frame rate. Take a video of several thousand frames and set the stacker to use the best 20% or so.  Also use an atmospheric dispersion corrector (ADC) to counteract the dispersion which gives some colour fringing in your image. As a cheap but inferior alternative to an ADC, try adjusting the red & blue alignment in the processing software.

If it's any consolation, a lot of my Saturn images don't show the division in the rings clearly either.

Seeing is also a major factor, so keep trying.



Doesn't seem too expensive, definitely looking into it!

[Jojo204]

On ‎24‎/‎05‎/‎2019 at 16:41, Vox45 said:

You say you took a 5sec video, that would be around 100 frames correct ?

Yes, unfortunately my silly self wasn't planning on using the video for stacking so I didn't take a very long recording. I thought individual frames would be better but I'm sticking with video from now! Nice shot too!

[Stu]

On 24/05/2019 at 08:41, Chefgage said:

We do not get that here in the UK.

Until 2032.....

[Chefgage]

1 minute ago, Stu said:

Until 2032.....

Not too long to wait then

[Stu]

3 minutes ago, Chefgage said:

Not too long to wait then

Well to be fair it get slightly better each year from now on. This is for the UK, for the OP it depends where they are relative to our latitude.

[Chefgage]

3 hours ago, Stu said:

Well to be fair it get slightly better each year from now on. This is for the UK, for the OP it depends where they are relative to our latitude.

Jupiter and mars look best on that graph. Nice steep climb over the next two or three years.