Venus, Jupiter, Saturn images

Dave,
Now that I am looking at these images on my laptop
I can see that the background is different alright.

I guess it's just different screens will show up different things.
Not to worry though.
If Damien Peach gets away with it..!!?

They do seem a little out of focus alright.
I was guessing it was just the seeing though.
Venus is very big.
If I may, I would suggest to reduce it in size
then cut and past the new sized one
(with a reasonable ammount of background)
Into a new size (say the size the Jupiter one is.)

What I usually do is
get the background of the
new size by using the eyedropper tool
and picking a color from a point as close
the the limb of the planet as possable -
I zoom in to the max untill I can see huge pixels
and the color then becomes very obvious.
In this way when you past in the new cropped venus
you wont get (or at least it should minimize) any
obvious tell tale signs of cutting and pasting.

i hope I'm not preaching to the teacher here -
apologies if you know this...

I did use the eyedrop tool but perhaps not near enough to the planet.
Since its going to be raining all day tomorrow, I should have time to have another go at these.

The blurriness was the seeing, Jupiter was skimming along the roof tops, imagine what the heat waves of warm slates does to an image. I reckon I'll even have a worse view of it next year. If it was out of focus, Europa would not have been captured.

DaveG, I've never heard of that technique, I might give it a go next time.

Remember all feedback is good, please say what you think.

Actually, Now that I am thinking about it,
the eye dropper tool will only give one colour
an even if its the majority colour in the origional it
still wont create the same background.
How about selecting a square
(say the top right hand part of the Saturn one)
from just inside the edge down to the edge of the planet.
Then copy and paste it a bunch of times into
the blank one.
That way it will be exactly the same background.

....must give it a try now!

As for the IR and regular shots of the webcam.
What do you do there?
Is it like shooting RGB for deep space stuff?

Yea, the old fashioned way, and I know Saturn looks out of focus, the low res of it is because of the very dim image it presents at this size and its low altitude didn't help either, is this why you asked ? or do they all look out of focus? :oops:

Mainly the Saturn image, but from up here anyway the seeing hasn't been great for me lately with alot of turbulance in the air resulting in blurry views of Saturn.
In terms of focusing, I personally don't think the standard focuser is accurate enough for imaging. Electronic focusers are the only way to ensure accurate focus imho. I even found that using an electric focuser and trying to estimate the best point of focus by looking at the computer screen wasn't good enopugh either. The only way I could ensure I got sharp deep sky images was to let the electric focuser determine focus automatically. However, you may be able to do better.

I use the zero image shift focuser, but I do it by eye as opposed to a program focusing for me. The main focuser is just not good enough for me to use also.
For deepsky, electronic focusing via a program is the only way to do it, as you say, due to the very low light levels.