First image of Saturn

[Adam1234]

I took a break from DSO imaging this evening and had a go at imaging Saturn, not the best image by far but I am reasonably happy with this as a first image, especially considering my chosen equipment was less than ideal for planetary (10-inch sky-watcher dobsonian, 2x barlow, Canon 2000D), my focus probably wasn't spot on as I don't have a bahtinov mask for this scope, and I've got a lot of learn on stacking and processing planetary images (I mostly do DSO).

I took about 4 x 60s videos using the APT planetary option (it was averaging about 15fps, not sure how to go higher fps?), took the resulting jpeg images it produces and used PIPP to create one AVI video which I then loaded into Autostakkert for stacking (I tried opening the individual frames but it seems to only let me open about 2000 or so frames for some reason? hence why I made a AVI video of all the frames in PIPP). I thinkt I chose to stack the best 60% frames, not sure whether I should have gone higher or lower.

I opened the stacked image in Registax and had a play around with the wavelets (really no idea what I was doing here so I just used the wavelet settings in this thread https://stargazerslounge.com/topic/184821-beginners-guide-to-stacking-planetary-images-with-autostakkert2/

A small tweak in photoshop and this is my resulting image. Not great, but not bad for a first attempt I don't think. Any advice for improvement will be much appreciated, especially some explanation on how best to use the wavelets in Registax 

 

 

 

 

Thanks, Adam

 

[Nik271]

That's a great image, Adam! Certainly much better than my first one

Saturn is quite low and this year (and next) so can't really expect much better than this.

Here is how to choose how many frames to stack: when you analyse the frames in Autostakkert look at the graph which lists them ordered by quality. I personally aim to stack frames which are in the top 75% in quality, this usually means I only stack between 10% and 25% of the frames, depending on the seeing conditions.

 

Pipp also has quality sorting option which is very helpful. I usually choose to discard 30% of the lowest quality according to Pipp and then load Autostakkert. 

So its important  to shoot many frames, 3-4 thousand at a minimum.

 

Also Saturn rotates, slower than Jupiter and stacking will compensate for it, but there is a limit how far you can go without derotation. I personally would try to asqure all frames in a 5-6 minute interval at most, since I'm not using derotation.

Clear skies!

 

Nikolay

 

 

[Adam1234]

4 hours ago, Nik271 said:

That's a great image, Adam! Certainly much better than my first one

Saturn is quite low and this year (and next) so can't really expect much better than this.

Here is how to choose how many frames to stack: when you analyse the frames in Autostakkert look at the graph which lists them ordered by quality. I personally aim to stack frames which are in the top 75% in quality, this usually means I only stack between 10% and 25% of the frames, depending on the seeing conditions.

 

Pipp also has quality sorting option which is very helpful. I usually choose to discard 30% of the lowest quality according to Pipp and then load Autostakkert. 

So its important  to shoot many frames, 3-4 thousand at a minimum.

 

Also Saturn rotates, slower than Jupiter and stacking will compensate for it, but there is a limit how far you can go without derotation. I personally would try to asqure all frames in a 5-6 minute interval at most, since I'm not using derotation.

Clear skies!

 

Nikolay

 

 

Hi Nikolay, thanks for the kind words and the tips! Much appreciated.

I'll give it another process tonight and reduce down the % of frames I stack and make sure I'm only selecting the best. If I remember right I've got between 4000-5000 frames from 4 or 5 60s videos