My first images (of Saturn, again)

[JamesF]

There's a bit of a Saturn vibe happening at the moment, so here are my first efforts at imaging. Taken with the 127 Mak on Friday night with an SPC880 in raw mode and 2x barlow. The seeing was pretty poor if I'm honest -- the image was jumping about a fair bit and as a result I think my main problem (other than not really knowing my way around Registax) is poor focus. (I have since "borrowed" one of my wife's clothes pegs for a fine focus control.)

James

[msinclairinork]

Very good first attempt, The image scale looks great!

Shame the focus was out a tad otherwise you would have had your self a real winner!

Next time though

Still, can make out plenty detail ie. ring seperation & cloud belts.

Well done,

Michael

[neil phillips]

Theres more to this image than you think, processing can do so much. just a quick play here didnt spend too long and probably could be improved. you got the cassini and the red ring on the pole. well done. focus does look a little soft, but hard to tell if processing is causing blur too. it might be, if your not killing bad frames during stacking ? i assume you are. hope you dont mind my input. btw i like your naturaL feel thats hard on saturn on this size scope, keep doing what your doing nail focus, and you might get better still

[JamesF]

I very much welcome your input, thank you. I love that you can see the rings clearly in front of the planet now. What extra processing did you do to create those two images?

I don't think I lost too much when I stacked the images. I really struggled to find anything sharp when I went through the avi files. Partly I think that's down to the seeing and partly my lack of experience. I shall be making up a focus mask for next time I think (and hopefully getting a better sky).

James

[RogerTheDodger]

Very good first image

[neil phillips]

I did quite a few things, a resize, deconvolution on image analyzer, dropped blacks on image analyzer, and adjusted colour, did rgb align on registax 5 to get rid of the blue bottom. a bit of colour saturation, i did some more sharpening on reg5 2nd wavelet. which made the image very noisy. i then did noise reduction doing freuquency domain filter, again image analyzer. Btw its free to download

[msinclairinork]

I did quite a few things, a resize, deconvolution on image analyzer, dropped blacks on image analyzer, and adjusted colour, did rgb align on registax 5 to get rid of the blue bottom. a bit of colour saturation, i did some more sharpening on reg5 2nd wavelet. which made the image very noisy. i then did noise reduction doing freuquency domain filter, again image analyzer. Btw its free to download

Great tips Neil!

We should comission you to wright a book or a primer on planetary processing!

Thanks for sharing,

Michael

[Spikey]

James these are very good for a first attempt.

[Taff]

Hi James' you do find that some nights the planets do jump around unsteady sky.Nice captures of saturn.Mark

[JamesF]

Certainly. On Friday night (when I captured these images) it was moving around quite noticeably on the screen. I don't notice it so much with an eyepiece. Perhaps the brain just smooths some of it out.

Looks like it might well be the same again tonight. I can see Orion and Leo, but there appears to be a lot of thin haze floating across the sky. I shall wander out later nonetheless.

James