Uranus and Rings through Nextstar 4se

[J47]

Hi everyone I managed to wake up early this morning and get a great image processed using Registax6.1 of Uranus. I am new to astrophotography but enjoying every second of it. I have a Nexstar 4se that I used to capture these images with also increased my zoom by using a 2x Barlow. Only through my Neximage Burst Color (in which was used to take the images) was I able to make out to hazy blue planet best. Using iCap2.4 software for capturing the images heres what I did.....

- Images taken and processed September 4, 2019 around 5:00 A.M.- 5:30 A.M.

- decreased the gain to around 330-380 while exposure was set to 27 fps

- adjusted my focus

- took 200 frames at 25 fps

Continuing to Registax I processed the images only using the best frames out of 100, I added a few prefilters: BLUR was adjusted slightly to around 10-15, SMOOTH was decreased by around 5, and contrast prefilter, forget what it was called, was reduced to .90. 

I tuned the wavelets until the hazy spot between the rings and planet were no longer visible and the difference with the rings and planet begin to appear. Here's the results hope they are as cool to everyone else, as I find it amazing my 4se can see that much into detail.

uranus-rings.bmp

[Davey-T]

Hi and welcome to SGL.

Hope you don't mind I had a mess with your image, cropped, enlarged and saved as PNG so it will display on here without downloading.

Dave

 

[J47]

Oh thank you I was uncertain that there was a way to have it up without download and looks much better cropped, much appreciated. J47(JAY) 

[Space Hopper]

Are you sure they are the rings...? Sorry, i'm not so sure....but if they indeed are, well done

I thought they were way too faint too be seen by amateur scopes, and indeed the likes of Hubble are needed to tease them out from Earth.

Reason being, rather than being made of reflective ice particles, they are mainly comprised of unreflective dust.

[J47]

weeellll, I'm not 100 percent on if they are the rings or not but they were alot brighter i faded them out during processing to hopefully get the clear image of the planet but it seemed they didn't disappear as easily as I thought casual fuzz might have but this is my first time observing a farther planet such as Uranus, I'm used to the usual Saturn, or Jupiter astrophotography and how they act in our atmosphere and I do agree it would be a far catch to have such brightness in the rings but one online search had me wondering it was images taken of Uranus on the same plane and said the rings were luminescent from the particles not disagreeing with you because again I am new to thus but the link was of much greater detail of that you would expect being the images taken from space telescopes but the rings put off a hazy like image in their photo that was very similar in relation to my photo just very miniature. I do lean both ways but might I add Uranus was also, before processing the image, was just a single blob and hazy then after tuning the wavelets did the rings appear.

[J47]

I also have read into the angle we view Uranus and everything I found related to Uranus looking somewhat like a bullseye due to the angle at which it sits in relativity to Earth and that the rings are vertical. Not certain on if any of those links were recent or not but I agree there is some questioning due to the fact of their faintness thanks for that observation I was also hoping for feedback as such incase this was infact an operator error lol