Hi Kathy,
Planetary is just is different discipline; it's a bit like taking a person who fly fishes to a gravel pit and asking them to catch Tench. It's fishing, but not as they know it.
My interest in astronomy was fired by the moon landing, but much more so when I first saw Saturn. So when I got the chance to image the ringed planet it was going to be high on my agenda.
Planets are relatively big, so the atmospheric turbulence makes them bounce around, rather than twinke like stars. So image them at high declinations, this will also reduce atmospheric dispersion which blurs them.
Then lucky image them; take as many video frames as you can before planetary rotation will cause an issue. For example on the Mars image, I am processing currently I took 25,000 frames into PIPP [a utility that looks at image quality) and set it to pick the best 2500 these ranged in quality from 100% on the reference to 89% on the last frame. This is prior to stacking them.
These ’best’ images go into Autostakkert and having analysed the frames I ask AS!3 to select the best 30% to stack. I am now down to 750 frames; the ’lucky’ few if you like.
These go into Registax, now I've found that wavelets 1&6 are key and they are set to close to 100% tweaked for sharpness and denoised to get rid of the artefacts 2 to 5 are set at lower % and used to pull out surface detail. Then stretch the histogram. From there for me a hop to Photoshop more stretching in levels and finally I use the Topaz AI filter on focus to make things as sharp as I can.
This is the image that popped out SE6 x3 Excel LX Barlow, SVBony helical focusser & ZWO ASI 224MC.
Oh, and 01:30 in the morning, no observatory, damp grass and 8C
:twocents:
Cheers,
Tony.
Smart Scope: Dwarf II - Club and outreach work.
AP Refractor: Altair 72EDF Deluxe F6;1x & 0.8 Flatteners; Antares Versascope 60mm finder. ASIAir Pro.Li battery pack for grab & go.
Celestron AVX Mount; X-cel LX eyepieces & Barlows 2x 3x, ZWO 2” Filter holder,
Cameras: main DSO ASI533MC; DSO guide ASI120MM; Planetary ASI224MC; DSLR Canon EOS100 stock.
Filters: Astronomik IR cut; Optolong L-Pro; Optolong L-Enhance.
Binoculars: Celestron 15 x 70.
Latitude: 52.219853
Longitude: -1.034471
Accuracy: 5 m
Bortle 4 site.
https://maps.google.com/?q=52.21985,-1.03447