SharpCap Forums

So I decided to get into planetary imaging and I’m sharing below my very first images of the two gas giants. I spent months studying scopes, gear and tutorials and finally settled on equipment and workflow. I made this decision because I felt my local light pollution would not be a detrimental influence to the image quality of such targets, but I quickly came to fathom the negative impact of bad local seeing instead! Nevertheless, it was super fun to get into and even though some of my more “seasoned” planetary imaging friends recommended another software for acquisition, I simply could not get along with it and stuck with trusty Sharpcap, which was easier for me, more intuitive, more familiar and ultimately more fun. Hope you like them and thanks for looking

https://www.astrobin.com/9fq0wl/?nc=user
https://www.astrobin.com/xj5jcd/0/
Minos

Very nice! What telescope and camera did you use?

Remarkable, Minos! Saturn is quite low to the horizon in Sagittarius. Great work!

Brian

Minos

A sturdy first attempt at planetary imaging. The ADC and UV-IR cut filter will have helped. Nice moon shadow on Jupiter, have you worked out which moon it is?

Tell the missus you need a Celestron C14.

Mars has much higher elevation and will be improving for the next few weeks.

https://www.thelondonastronomer.com/it- ... ry-imaging for when you inevitably turn your sights on WinJupos.

Dave

Thanks guys!

Would love me a C14 and suitable mount, I'm sure it will comfort me loads when the missus kicks me out and I'm sleeping in the garage with it!

Thanks for the link Dave, will give it a thorough read. Good to know rotational periods and suitable capture duration limitations. I most definitely exceeded those in the captures above, but at 500fps with 320x230 ROI I should still get enough data with shorter captures for good enough SNR in the stack and the lack of rotation should produce a sharper image.

The ADC and UV/IR filter was a must in buidling this rig. I tried without them just for a look-to-see experiment and gasped at the appaling sight on my screen.

Planning to have a go at Mars and also Winjupos in due course as well. The gas giants are indeed not very high on the horizon here on Long Island, and the buildings I'm imaging over absorb heat from the sun all day and release it at night in addition to having aircon units blowing out warm air, all to say this ruins the local seeing - planetary is a whole new ball game...

Happy to be exploring new avenues in astronomy

Best,
Minos

P.S. the moon is Ganymede

Hi Minos,

a really excellent pair of pictures for a first attempt – I can't quite work out from your write-up whether you run them through wavelet sharpening in registax or not yet - from the looks of the images I'd say perhaps not in which case it would certainly be worth a shot.

Cheers, Robin

Thanks Robin! You are correct, I didn’t run them through Registax, went straight into photoshop with the stack. Will do though, very excited to learn all that is planetary

Best,
Minos

You will be shocked how big a difference wavelets make, you get really nice images from Raws that look like blurry messes, I skipped learning registax and am using wavelets in a relatively new program called astrosurface, I think registax May have a few more fine tuning controls but astrosurface seems to work well for me so far

Hi,

thanks for the mention of AstroSurface – not a tool that I'd encountered before and it looks quite powerful. It's good to have an alternative to Registax (which can be a bit temperamental at times).

Cheers, Robin

Minos

A shameless plug viewtopic.php?f=35&t=1156

Using linked wavelets https://www.astronomie.be/registax/previewv6paul.html

Dave