First image of Saturn

Ok, further to my post last night. Well I re-read Mike Salways article on ICEINSPACE and realised that PPMCentre might be able to help me.

First I loaded up the avi in VirtualDub and deleted the obviously bad frames due to bouncing in the wind, where Saturn went to close to the edge or off of frame, where the seeing was obviously very bad. This whittled down the frames to about 1300 from 1800.

Then I converted the avi to a sequence of BMP's. Ran them through PPM Center (now known as Ninox) and it centered Saturn in the frame and cropped to a 400x400 pixel size frame.

Then fed this into registax set to 85% quality and folloed the rest of Dave Lilis fabulous tutorial. Alignment went perfectly and registax whittled down the frames to about 70. Does the referance frame setting of 50 whittle the 70 frames down to 50??

Anyway, played around with the wavelets tab just using 1 and 2. I was set to about 18 and 2 to about 8. the other tabs seemed to over enhance and flatten the image taking away the 3d'ness and making Saturn look flat.

Then I adjusted Hue and Saturation and saved the image. Opened it in Paint.net and further adjusted hue and saturation as well as contrast.

This is the resulting image based on what turned out to be not great seeing after all, 50 or 70 frames and the above settings.

So here it is, my second attempt at imaging Saturn.

I am hopeful for tonight. Its supposted to be clear and calm.

Some more from last night.

I'll process the other avi's soon and maybe redo the 5x barlow one. Think I limited that to 95%. ie 50 frame stack. Its a bit dim. Maybe 85-90% and it'll be brighter and smoother. Will I not have to be so harsh on the wavelets to bring out detail then?? 85-90% giving approx. 500 frames didn't seem to harm the other two.

How do some of the guys get such smooth but detail rich pics??

BTW. I redid one with more heavy wavelet procesing to bring out the white patches above the equatorial belt. Are those storms on Saturn??

Can't seem to re-process the 5x barlow version with a 90% threshold to give me more frames to stack. Registax keeps hanging on the Optimise and Stack part of the process.

The last one was one of the 2x barlow avi's. I did about 4 of them. Looks like they might not be worth processing. I never changed the exposure settings on the camera after setting it for the 3x and 5x barlow versions. Looks like they are over exposed. Not to the extent that you cant see a disk and rings and gap between the planet and rings. ie not bloated over exposed, but the disc and rings are brilliant white.

Are these usable?? Maybe just stack less of them so the final image isn't as bright?

As for the 5x barlow version. Well, I don't think the seeing really supported that image scale as the 3x and even the 2x versions look as good/bad as the 5x when scaled up in size to match the 5x verion. Was still worthwhile though if only to get practice in landing Saturn at that image scale and F ratio on the chip.

All fab images Keith

Well done

Keith to get smooth detail take as many frames as possible and stack as many as possible.

take a 5min avi at 10 frames per second = 3000 frames and stack the best 2000 to 2500 of them.

even at 5fps thats 1500 frames and stack the best say 1200.

btw anoter good freeware to add to your armour is avi dub. allows you to split an avi into indiv frmes and remove the dodgy ones like you had with your wind :oops: problems then re-save the avi.

Dave Gradwell