I had a break in the clouds for a little bit, well not completely, we had some high thin clouds passing through, but aside from that it was a good night for some planetary. For anyone that has followed along with me you would know that I don't do a whole lot of planetary imaging. I'm trying to do more of it when I can, but short summer nights don't leave me a whole lot of time to play around with setting until I figure it all out. So, what I do is I go out and record about 15 or so 60-120 videos and hope that somewhere in there I have something usable. Between the atmospheric distortion, clouds, focusing issues, and trying different settings it's all a crap shoot when I do planetary. I could get a bunch of videos, but not have much to work with in the end due to any of those factors I listed.
Well, while I was out on July 14, I have at least one good video I could get some pleasing results from. I was unable to get out early enough to catch the red spot, and I wasn't able to catch a Galilean moon transit Jupiter, but I got Jupiter, and the four Galilean moons! I was having trouble with the data all day, and I decided to tweak some settings, and one of the tweaks must have done the trick. I got a Jupiter image I'm happy with. This was seriously something I was doing all day long until I got it right.
Enough talk, let's get on with showing the picture. The first one is just the image, and the second one I labeled the moons.
Saturn on the other hand was a bit easier once I kept the same workflow going from my Jupiter image. The hardest/longest part about doing everything on Saturn was the long wait times for every step of the preprocessing stage. I was not able to capture any of the moons of Saturn, but that's ok, I did happen to get the Cassini Division in the rings, so I'm quite happy with that. Focus was off just a little bit for Saturn, and it shows a lot along the Cassini Division, without that you might not even notice. Overall I'm pleased with the final results of my night out doing a bit of planetary. I hope I get some more clear skies soon so that I can have another attempt at these two planets.
Both of these images came from 2 minute videos with ~3000 frames. For Jupiter I kept the best 60% of the frames because the overall video and quality of the frames was very good. For Saturn I kept only the best 15% due to cloud and atmospheric interference. I then took these videos and ran them through Planetary Imaging PreProcessor (PIPP), then I took the stabalized and converted video into Autostakkert to be aligned and stacked, then into Registax for wavelet sharpening, and then finally into Gimp for the final touches of bringing out color and detail in the image.
There has to be another way where this can be done in one program, but it seems these are the steps most people take when doing planetary. I know a lot of people use WinJupos, but that just seems like a bit too much for me at this point in my planetary imaging adventure.
Well, while I was out on July 14, I have at least one good video I could get some pleasing results from. I was unable to get out early enough to catch the red spot, and I wasn't able to catch a Galilean moon transit Jupiter, but I got Jupiter, and the four Galilean moons! I was having trouble with the data all day, and I decided to tweak some settings, and one of the tweaks must have done the trick. I got a Jupiter image I'm happy with. This was seriously something I was doing all day long until I got it right.
Enough talk, let's get on with showing the picture. The first one is just the image, and the second one I labeled the moons.
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| Jupiter on July 14, 2019, |
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| Jupiter on July 14, 2019 with Ganymede, Io, Callisto, and Europa labeled. |
Saturn on the other hand was a bit easier once I kept the same workflow going from my Jupiter image. The hardest/longest part about doing everything on Saturn was the long wait times for every step of the preprocessing stage. I was not able to capture any of the moons of Saturn, but that's ok, I did happen to get the Cassini Division in the rings, so I'm quite happy with that. Focus was off just a little bit for Saturn, and it shows a lot along the Cassini Division, without that you might not even notice. Overall I'm pleased with the final results of my night out doing a bit of planetary. I hope I get some more clear skies soon so that I can have another attempt at these two planets.
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| Saturn July 14, 2019 |
Both of these images came from 2 minute videos with ~3000 frames. For Jupiter I kept the best 60% of the frames because the overall video and quality of the frames was very good. For Saturn I kept only the best 15% due to cloud and atmospheric interference. I then took these videos and ran them through Planetary Imaging PreProcessor (PIPP), then I took the stabalized and converted video into Autostakkert to be aligned and stacked, then into Registax for wavelet sharpening, and then finally into Gimp for the final touches of bringing out color and detail in the image.
There has to be another way where this can be done in one program, but it seems these are the steps most people take when doing planetary. I know a lot of people use WinJupos, but that just seems like a bit too much for me at this point in my planetary imaging adventure.
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