The Art and Science of Planetary Imaging » Saturn http://gdmig-ceastronomy.org/ltowens by Larry Owens Mon, 05 Sep 2011 18:12:15 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 RegiStax v5 and Saturn http://gdmig-ceastronomy.org/ltowens/2009/03/08/registax-v5-and-saturn http://gdmig-ceastronomy.org/ltowens/2009/03/08/registax-v5-and-saturn#comments Mon, 09 Mar 2009 02:41:12 +0000 ltowens http://ceastronomy.org/ltowens/?p=103 Jim Honeycutt reminded me this past Saturday that RegiStax 5 is available in beta, so since I haven’t been able to image lately, I decided to download it and give it a try on some earlier sets. 

This image was processed with version 5.  I hadn’t bothered to process this set because of the softness of the avi’s.  This one was taken at 07:37UT on February 1st, 2009, CMI: 161.5  CMII: 122.9   CMIII: 14.2:

2009-02-01_02-37-26_rgb_v5_wv_stage1_lrgb_flat_stg2

The avi’s were bouncing around somewhat with a seeing estimate of 3-4/10.  It was taken with a Skynyx2-0M and C14 at F/25.71; Custom Scientific RGB filters.

I was somewhat happy with the results, especially since I’d given up on this set.  Registax5 seemed to pull out some interesting detail from very limited data.

 

The following is a comparison of the same image processed by Registax4 and 5.  In this comparison, the v5 image seems to have more noise, but I may have gone too far with wavelet processing on my first try with v5.  I typically apply wavelets modestly and let PhotoShop do the rest, but I wanted to test the limits.

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I’m happy to see progress on this excellent FREE software for stacking astronomical images.  Being a programmer myself, I know that developing software like this takes hundreds if not thousands of hours of work by dedicated individuals.   Many thanks to the Registax version5 team!

Download RegiStax version 5 here (beta now – released version soon).

Larry

]]> http://gdmig-ceastronomy.org/ltowens/2009/03/08/registax-v5-and-saturn/feed 0 Saturn, February 2009 http://gdmig-ceastronomy.org/ltowens/2009/02/28/saturn-february-2009 http://gdmig-ceastronomy.org/ltowens/2009/02/28/saturn-february-2009#comments Sat, 28 Feb 2009 21:34:18 +0000 ltowens http://ceastronomy.org/ltowens/?p=81 This set of images was taken under slightly better skies and actually picked out one of Saturn’s recent equatorial storms (just under the rings, left of center).  I also imaged in the Methane band, which gives the planet an oddly bright set or rings.  The soft appearance of the Methane shot is due to a 2.5 second exposure per frame. (Click image for a larger view)

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]]> http://gdmig-ceastronomy.org/ltowens/2009/02/28/saturn-february-2009/feed 0 Saturn, December 2008 http://gdmig-ceastronomy.org/ltowens/2009/02/28/saturn-december-2008 http://gdmig-ceastronomy.org/ltowens/2009/02/28/saturn-december-2008#comments Sat, 28 Feb 2009 21:28:28 +0000 ltowens http://ceastronomy.org/ltowens/?p=78 From the fall of 2008 through the winter of 2009, Earth will be near Saturn’s ring plane, giving us an edge-on view of the rings.  Here’s an image taken under somewhat turbulent atmospheric conditions, but it certainly shows the edge-on appearance of the rings (click image for larger view):

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