Help! Don't know what I'm doing with planets

[KathyNS]

Mars won't be this good for 15 years, they are saying, so I mounted the C-11 and shot some frames of Mars. While I was waiting for it to clear the trees, I shot some of Saturn as well. I would have done Jupiter, but it was down in the trees already.

I can see that I have some serious atmospheric dispersion happening, and my focus probably wasn't as good as it should have been. (I forgot to dig out my 11" Bahtinov mask and use it when I was doing my alignment.) So I know these images aren't going to win any awards. But I'd like them to look like something.

These were the best 10% of the frames shot, stacked in AutoStakkert. I know I've seen an RGB align feature in some software somewhere, to help with the dispersion, but I can't find one now. I did a little bit of sharpening, using either wavelets or deconvolution on various attempts. No matter what I do, any sharpening brings out the "boiling water" effect seen here.

Am I doing something wrong in the stacking, or was the seeing really that bad? I knew it wasn't great, but I've seen worse. Saturn was at about 22 degrees elevation. Mars was about 25 degrees. I know that waiting until Mars was higher would have given me a better image, but I'm not used to sitting out in the observatory in the cold.

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[helicon]

Nice shots Kathy.

I was looking at Mars visually about 15 minutes ago, still dark with the planet in the western sky at about 30 degrees above the horizon. It was interesting because the seeing here was significantly worse than yesterday morning, so the southern polar cap was less obvious, syrtis major was not as well defined, and the object seemed to "boil" slightly.

[Star Dad]

Yeah, Kathy - that is what I'm seeing too. Terribly disappointed. I'm sure the Maksutov-Cassegrain I have borrowed can do better, but The best I've seen is a very blurry south pole ice cap, Valles Marineras, and Mons Olympus (I think). The atmosphere down here (from you) is nothing but a roiling mess lately. Sometimes you can actually see the light being bent by the turbulence. I've tried imaging it but I get nothing better than you - and it's been around 40 degrees altitude. I keep hoping as we move further towards winter that the atmosphere will calm down - I just hope it's not too late. Well <sigh> it is what it is. Cheers!

[yobbo89]

you have a singificant ammount of atmospheric dispersion which is a good indication that you're low in the horizon , even given that you had an adc , that still is alot of atmosphere to look through and alot of bad frames comming in . i whish i could help kathy but it really is garbish in / garbish out for planetary work .

but it does look like you might have some stacking artifacts , try using a larger ap size , maybe 104, even manualy add your own .

autostackert has a graph that list the quality from good to worst and tells you the stack percent you should use when you click on a reference frame .
holding down controll key and clicking on the graph will calculate the percentage to stack



registacks has an rgb alighnment tool, also try sharpening the larger layers first slightly, layer 6-5-4 ectt .
sharpening with too little ammount of good frames can give bad results,you might find that stacking more average frames will give better sharpening and show more detail ..

every night i come home and look at the stars flickering rapidly at 30 deg and i just go back inside ....

[KathyNS]

Thanks! It looks like it was the AP size that made the biggest difference. And, while I can't figure out Registax's wavelets (I used PixInsight's instead), I did find and use its RGB Align feature.

They will never win any awards - there is no substitute for good focus, for example - I am fairly pleased with the results.

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[jrkirkham]

I like them. I would be very pleased with them. The last time I tried to take a shot of Mars it bounced like a basketball. I had trouble taking frames that were even round. I think the atmosphere was messing with me.

[Gordon]

Those are a great start.

I've tried capturing some planets in the past but I really don't have the right equipment. I was going to give it a try last night but since it's been so long I couldn't get the spacing right to use my color camera so this morning I set everything up in my garage and shot at some trees down the road and finally got the configuration set right, so I will try again.

It sounds like you are going through the right steps, just have to get the processing 'tweaks' down.

[sdbodin]

Same problem as me this time of year, the jet stream passing straight overhead. Seeing always sucks in the fall. I'm probably all done with planets this year, but at least got to see Mars.

Steve

[Greenman]

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: