Help! Tell me everything I've got wrong here in this one picture!

[Doberamus]

Hey,

Very new to this, and finding it all a bit daunting. 

Have a Celestron Evoluton 8" SCT, with an Altair 290c cmos camera. Was shooting Jupiter through a 2x Barlow the other morning and all the images came out like the attached.

So, how much am I doing wrong?

Firstly, why is it red? (i can't find any way to change colour balance on Altair capture, do I just have to remove colour as the last stage?)

I could see lots of detail in the eyepiece, so is the lack of detail here because focus, or exposure/gain? Or bad seeing? Or should I be able to extract more detail in "post"?

How do I (can I?) shoot it so I can actually see the Galilean moons as well, without pushing the gain so high that the planet is a glowing white ball?

Even partial answers would be great, thanks.

Yet to be convinced by this type of camera, so I'm clearly doing something wrong!

Thanks!

Untitled.tiff

[SyedT]

Hi there!

It would be helpful if you could post details e.g. did you capture a video or just images, how many images/videos you took, and your processing workflow.

As for the Galilean moons, those are usually composited from an image with higher gain.

Cheers

[JoshHopk]

From the provided image I'd say that your focus is out. The reddish look is likely because of this and also the image is a bit underexposed.

It could however be because you're taking single frames as opposed to a video and then stacking the individual frames, if you could perhaps provide more info then others will be able to help you a bit better.

As mentioned before, the Galilean moons are usually composited in post. One image with a higher exposure/gain for the moons, and then a lower exposure/gain image for Jupiter are blended together.

 

[Doberamus]

Sorry, more info!

That image was stacked from  a video recorded through Altair capture, and then processed with Lynkeos. All on a MacBook. Probably about 150 images. Honestly the final frame looks very similar to the frames in the video, and the stacking didn't draw out any great detail.

Is it a case of twiddling gain and exposure to find the magic ratio for detail?

 

Edited May 22, 2020 by Doberamus

[JoshHopk]

17 minutes ago, Doberamus said:

Sorry, more info!

That image was stacked from  a video recorded through Altair capture, and then processed with Lynkeos. All on a MacBook. Probably about 150 images. Honestly the final frame looks very similar to the frames in the video, and the stacking didn't draw out any great detail.

Is it a case of twiddling gain and exposure to find the magic ratio for detail?

 

Thanks for the info. I definitely think that Jupiter was out of focus, perhaps only slightly. 

Yes, I think you should crank up the exposure or gain next time, it looks a touch underexposed. The capture software should also give colour options, if you're capturing in RGB. 

[CraigT82]

Planetary imaging is all about the post processing. Stacking in itself wont bring  out more detail, but it improves the SNR to the extent that you can go to town on the sharpening, and it's at the sharpening stage where the magic happens! 

I haven't seen your image as my phone wont open tif files, but my advice is to collect and stack more frames, thousands rather than hundreds, and then put the stacked image in registax and drag the No2 slider to the right under the wavelets tab. This will bring out the detail you're looking for (hopefully!) As for the colour cast, this can be corrected post sharpening. Easiest way is to open up the image in photoshop or gimp and use the colour balance tools. It is a good idea to try to get the colour balance right at the capture phase. In firecapture you  can adjust the blue and red channels to match the green channel before capturing. 

[SyedT]

I agree with Josh in that it does look a touch out of focus. The best thing is to take a video which comprises a few thousand frames, and then run these through your software; the caveat to this is that the video for Jupiter shouldn't be longer than a couple of minutes due to rotation coming into play (I'm not sure whether Lynkeos can compensate for this?). I use PIPP and Autostakkert for video pre-processing and stacking respectively, followed by editing in Registax. I see that you use a Mac, but both PIPP and Autostakkert apparently do work on Mac according to their websites. As Craig said, the magic happens once you start to colour balance and sharpen the image using wavelet controls. 

Edited May 22, 2020 by SyedT

[Doberamus]

That's great everybody. Will get to work on looking at all of those suggestions, much appreciated!