Saturn 18/09/24 with 102ED Refractor

[WolfieGlos]

I haven't done much Planetary imaging, but a year on from my first attempts I decided to give Saturn a go under last nights Supermoon.

Starfield 102 + 2x Barlow + ASI 585mc.

Captured in ASI Studio, stacked in AS!4 with 1.5x drizzle, best 25% of 13524 frames.

Second rendition below with 4 Moons overexposed and layer-masked in.

[siatnite]

A lovely crisp Saturn & moons there well captured.

[Kon]

Very nice images considering the small aperture. The wife field view with the moons is putting it in nice perspective.

(It seems you have not done any sharpening from the description. You may want to try do some sharpening and RGB balance in registax or Astrosurface)

[WolfieGlos]

2 hours ago, siatnite said:

A lovely crisp Saturn & moons there well captured.

Thank you  

1 hour ago, Kon said:

Very nice images considering the small aperture. The wife field view with the moons is putting it in nice perspective.

(It seems you have not done any sharpening from the description. You may want to try do some sharpening and RGB balance in registax or Astrosurface)

Usually I get banished to far off places, but I didn't realise I sent my wife this far away  

Thanks Kon, I did apply some sharpening with Wavelets but any further sharpening just looked too fake and showed off the pixels...badly!

I did use the RGB align channels within AS!4, so is this still incorrectly RGB balanced? I haven't tried registax or Astrosurface, so I will check those out, thanks.

[Kon]

12 minutes ago, WolfieGlos said:

Thank you  

Usually I get banished to far off places, but I didn't realise I sent my wife this far away  

Thanks Kon, I did apply some sharpening with Wavelets but any further sharpening just looked too fake and showed off the pixels...badly!

I did use the RGB align channels within AS!4, so is this still incorrectly RGB balanced? I haven't tried registax or Astrosurface, so I will check those out, thanks.

Hahahaha....auto correct on my phone is to blame.

I meant to colour balance not align as it is currently a bit on the yellow side, otherwise they are really nice images.

16 minutes ago, WolfieGlos said:

I did apply some sharpening with Wavelets

16 minutes ago, WolfieGlos said:

I haven't tried registax or Astrosurface

Where do you do your wavelets? In registax or Astrosurface you will have a better control before it becomes pixilated and you can also apply denoising at the same time.

[Sarek]

Well done Chris. 

You've planted an idea in my head now!

[CraigT82]

 Very nice image indeed. I agree with Kostas a white balance and a touch bit of wavelets and / or LR Deconv in Astrosurface could really make it pop. 

[WolfieGlos]

2 hours ago, Kon said:

Hahahaha....auto correct on my phone is to blame.

I meant to colour balance not align as it is currently a bit on the yellow side, otherwise they are really nice images.

Where do you do your wavelets? In registax or Astrosurface you will have a better control before it becomes pixilated and you can also apply denoising at the same time.

Ha, I figured that! I just couldn't resist the opportunity

That's one thing I find odd, I generally think of Saturn being yellow but all of the recent images I see are more on the green side. Which mine did show, but not to the same extent as some of your excellent captures which I used as a reference.

I tried wavelets in Siril and PixInsight, PI actually gave a better result although I know it's not really a planetary processing package. I didn't actually apply any noise reduction here, didn't even consider it! I didn't actually make any colour changes in the process, all I did was wavelets / rotation and flip / minor BlurXT sharpening - which again - I understand isn't ideal for planetary, but it gave a nice result to my eyes.

I'll have a look at registax and Astrosurface, see what I can do. Also happy to share the stacked image if anyone wants a stab at it.

1 hour ago, CraigT82 said:

 Very nice image indeed. I agree with Kostas a white balance and a touch bit of wavelets and / or LR Deconv in Astrosurface could really make it pop. 

Thanks Craig!

2 hours ago, Sarek said:

Well done Chris. 

You've planted an idea in my head now!

Thanks Vaughan, sorry if I'm now spending your money haha.

Edited September 19 by WolfieGlos

[CraigT82]

3 minutes ago, WolfieGlos said:

Also happy to share the stacked image if anyone wants a stab at it.

Yeah go on then… always nice to play around with other peoples data! 
 

[Kon]

19 minutes ago, WolfieGlos said:

Also happy to share the stacked image if anyone wants a stab at it.

Yes please.

[WolfieGlos]

On 19/09/2024 at 12:47, CraigT82 said:

Yeah go on then… always nice to play around with other peoples data! 
 

 

On 19/09/2024 at 13:03, Kon said:

Yes please.

Here you go, 

Two stacks from AS!4, 25% frames, one without drizzle and one with 1.5x. The image I posted above was processed from the 1.5x.

I look forward to seeing what you guys can get from it

 

Edited Saturday at 23:54 by WolfieGlos

[Kon]

16 minutes ago, WolfieGlos said:

 

Here you go, 

Two stacks from AS!4, 25% frames, one without drizzle and one with 1.5x. The image I posted above was processed from the 1.5x.

I look forward to seeing what you guys can get from it

2024-09-18-0040_5-Saturn_lapl6_ap17.fit 16.79 MB · 0 downloads 2024-09-18-0040_5-Saturn_lapl6_ap17_Drizzle15.fit 151.1 MB · 0 downloads

This is my attempt without the drizzle image. REgistax wavelets and colour balance, Astrosurface for further colour enhancement and some denoising. I cropped the rest of the black, so no resizing. Next time gather more videos as you can derotate them in winjupos and increase your amount of frames stacked thus reducing noise and select the best frames from each.

 

[orion25]

Nice images, Chris. A tad yellow. @Kon did a great job with the color balance and sharpening. He'll always give you great advice.

Striking image with the moons added!

Reggie

[WolfieGlos]

2 hours ago, orion25 said:

Nice images, Chris. A tad yellow. @Kon did a great job with the color balance and sharpening. He'll always give you great advice.

Striking image with the moons added!

Reggie

Thanks Reggie! Yes, that seems to be the general gist of it! Agreed, Kon has done a superb job, so now I need to learn how he's done it  

8 hours ago, Kon said:

This is my attempt without the drizzle image. REgistax wavelets and colour balance, Astrosurface for further colour enhancement and some denoising. I cropped the rest of the black, so no resizing. Next time gather more videos as you can derotate them in winjupos and increase your amount of frames stacked thus reducing noise and select the best frames from each.

 

Wow, that looks a lot better! Thanks for this Kon, that's brilliant. I bet you're not used to working on such a small subject in an image.

I have a few more videos, some that were out of focus, others trying different gain/exposure settings, but I have 3 that are both in-focus with the same gain/exposure which I caught before the clouds rolled in (prior to the partial eclipse, annoyingly).

Should I use winjupos before or after processing each video?

[Kon]

5 minutes ago, WolfieGlos said:

Should I use winjupos before or after processing each video?

I would process first and then winjupos. Then see if you can sharpen tiny bit more. Even different exposures can be used, not ideal but give it a try.

[WolfieGlos]

7 minutes ago, Kon said:

I would process first and then winjupos. Then see if you can sharpen tiny bit more. Even different exposures can be used, not ideal but give it a try.

Thanks again Kon, I'll have a play with each and see what happens.

Yeah, I don't have the ideal setup currently (a 6m USB3 cable back to the laptop indoors) so I was trialling a lot with different exposures to try and boost the frame rate, max I could get was circa 37 fps. Once I get the mini PC and wireless hooked up, that should hopefully sort itself out by losing that long USB cable.

[WolfieGlos]

On 19/09/2024 at 14:27, Kon said:

This is my attempt without the drizzle image. REgistax wavelets and colour balance, Astrosurface for further colour enhancement and some denoising. I cropped the rest of the black, so no resizing. Next time gather more videos as you can derotate them in winjupos and increase your amount of frames stacked thus reducing noise and select the best frames from each.

 

Hi Kon, this was my result, I followed the same approach as you using non-drizzled data stacked in AS!4, colour balance and wavelets/denoising in Registax but I couldn't get Astrosurface to work for some reason. I then used winjupos to derotate the 3x 6 minute stacks, using the files with the same gain/exposure settings only.

I think a little bit more has come through in the banding, but I ended up with a black "dot" artifact, which is a bit annoying. I played about with the Weighting and LD values, originally there were 3 dots but I couldn't lose the single. It's not present in any of the 3 individual images, but comes through with the derotation. Nothing a bit of clonestamping couldn't solve I guess.

Derotated image straight from winjupos:

And then with some additional wavelets on the derotated image, think I prefer the version above to be honest.

[CraigT82]

You sure there wasn’t a shadow transit during your capture? they do appear as a tiny black dot like that. Maybe not though if not apparent in the individual captures. 

[WolfieGlos]

10 hours ago, CraigT82 said:

You sure there wasn’t a shadow transit during your capture? they do appear as a tiny black dot like that. Maybe not though if not apparent in the individual captures. 

Hi Craig, I wasn't aware of any shadow transits, but I have just checked and both Enceladus and Janus were casting shadows onto Saturn at the exact time I captured the images, in the same location as the black dot !

But I wouldn't say the shadow from those Moons would be as big as I have on my image? Or I wonder if what I've picked up, happens to be both of the Moons and their shadows, and due to the small image and pixel size, perhaps they've been merged into one by the software?

Then again, it doesn't appear in each of the three individual stacks (see below separate images), so I'm inclined to think it's a glitch.

[CraigT82]

This is my attempt with your stack (un drizzled one).

 

[CraigT82]

2 hours ago, WolfieGlos said:

Hi Craig, I wasn't aware of any shadow transits, but I have just checked and both Enceladus and Janus were casting shadows onto Saturn at the exact time I captured the images, in the same location as the black dot !

But I wouldn't say the shadow from those Moons would be as big as I have on my image? Or I wonder if what I've picked up, happens to be both of the Moons and their shadows, and due to the small image and pixel size, perhaps they've been merged into one by the software?

Then again, it doesn't appear in each of the three individual stacks (see below separate images), so I'm inclined to think it's a glitch.

If you wanna throw up your data somewhere would be happy to download and go through it to see if I get the same black dot

Edited Saturday at 19:28 by CraigT82

[Space Cowboy]

Very good image considering your small aperture.

[Ratlet]

Incredible image.  Might have to give it a try myself!

[CraigT82]

Ok I think it is a setting in Winjupos that has caused that black dot.

I derotated your three stacks and when I ticked the box in the options "corrections of planetary moons and their shadows", I get an artefact along the same lines, but a long black line instead of a dot (image 1)

Untick that box and the artefact goes away (image 2)

Haven't done any post processing other than the derotation

[WolfieGlos]

2 hours ago, CraigT82 said:

Ok I think it is a setting in Winjupos that has caused that black dot.

I derotated your three stacks and when I ticked the box in the options "corrections of planetary moons and their shadows", I get an artefact along the same lines, but a long black line instead of a dot (image 1)

Untick that box and the artefact goes away (image 2)

Haven't done any post processing other than the derotation

Thanks Craig for giving this a go, I'll try removing that option when I get a chance next. 

Thank you both @Ratlet and @Space Cowboy 

Edited Sunday at 16:57 by WolfieGlos