20 Tips for Taking Photos of Planets (in 11 minutes)

taking a great planet photo it's not as easy as clicking a button that's what the moon's for if you want some great tips about how to take good planetary images you'll have to sit through this lab and noxious [Music] just a quick shout-out to Cory from photographing space Cory and I are constantly messaging each other as we image the planets in space and we share tips I sometimes contribute there if you haven't heard of photographing space do check them out they've got a great website with lots of great resources seems obvious but bigger is better the bigger your telescope the more surface detail you get to get out of a planet 14-inch Schmitt Cassegrain telescopes are perfect for planetary imaging schmidt-cassegrain is in general our great telescopes for planetary they have really high focal lengths and that allows you to zoom in or magnify the image really closely of course you can always use a magnifier as well which doesn't always get you more detail unless the conditions are really good but using a bolo or Powermate magnifier can help you squeeze out a little more focal length from your telescope [Music] opposition every year as the planet's orbit there's a point in the year where the planet is close to Earth and on the opposite side of the Sun this is called opposition and this is when the planet you're photographing is biggest and brightest make sure you know the dates of opposition and plan your shoots around those dates throughout the night as the planet arcs across the sky along the ecliptic there is a point where we'll be highest in your sky try and plan your shoot to shoot as close as possible to that highest point or closer towards the zenith the planet is for less atmosphere you're shooting through so it's going to be clearest and best during those times with less atmospheric distortion [Music] astronomers are always talking about the seeing the seeing is basically the clarity of the sky because of atmospheric conditions things like the weather clouds hide clouds and how much water there is in the air the less water there is in the atmosphere between you and the planet the clearer it's gonna be poor seeing has this wobbly quality about it and you can see that when you're shooting something like the moon or a planet up close and you can see visibly shaking in really good seeing conditions you'll see that the planet doesn't wobble as much is really still unstable and will allow you to get better images via capture which is really the best acquisition software for planets you can get has a little feature called Auto align when you hit that it will stabilize your video so that as it records the planet will be dead center on the screen now for guide docks at the corners of the planet and if you drift a little you can nudge in and out with your hand controller Auto align makes it easier for stacking later so that things will be centered as you stack those frames Bucky imaging is the process of using a high-speed camera to grab lots of frames all once and then you can throw out the worst of those frames and keep say the best 20% the best 15 percent I tend to stick around 10 to 15 percent but it depends on the speed of your camera the faster you camera the more frames you can collect and then you can just keep the best you essentially want to stack just enough to remove the noise but not so much that you're smoothing everything out also make sure you use that region of interest feature so that you only capture a small box around the planet that will allow you to capture more frames really quickly and the more data you have the better if you have a choice go from mono camera mono camera I'll give you about 66% more detail that means you'll have to use RGB filters it's a little bit more work for a much better result my capture has this really great feature called Auto run so when you do have your RGB filters set up auto run lets you set up a sequence so that when you hit record it will record your red channel then your green Channel and your blue Channel in your luminance if using that as well and that means you can just keep it in record and it will keep recording that sequence make sure that each channel is has a good level that means you're not clipping data on the black or the white side of the histogram I usually have the histogram in fire capture peaking at about 7 PI percent away the way across and then adjust each of your channels so that it's peaking around that same area of course you can adjust your color balance later on in post-processing but it's good to have a good data to start with on each of those channels [Music] collimation is really really important this means that especially on schmidt-cassegrain telescopes you'll have three screws or three knobs that you need to adjust so that the circular Airy disk of the star when it's out of focus is as symmetrical as possible but what I try and do is column eight right before I shoot the planet at the same focal length using the same barlow or magnifier that I have on the telescope and go over to a bright star put it out of focus and this make sure that airy disk is symmetrical if it's not make your adjustments then and I also can't recommend highly enough a product called Bob's nobs if you haven't seen this before it replaces the screws on your schmidt-cassegrain with little knobs that you can make fine adjustments on and this really takes a lot of the hassle out of collimating and it makes it something that you can do before each session rather than once a month [Music] obviously focus is something that's really important so keep your focus routines sorted out really early on some people like to use a baton of masks which is a great method but you can do it visually as well it can be hard to focus on a planet so what I tend to do is focus on a star first or go to a dense part of the Milky Way something with dim stars medium stars bright stars and really focus that up so that I can see a lot of detail throughout the star field and then when I swing over to my planet I know it's in focus Auto stack of two is probably the best stacking software for planetary out there I really recommend it and when you do go to do your planetary stacking use the drizzle feature you just get a little more resolution out of these very small planets which can really help when you go to share your images later take a series of images don't just take one run of RGB or one run of your color image and finished up there in a process that I like to call lucky lucky imaging take lots of them maybe over thirty minutes or even a now if you've got enough hard drive space that way when you go to stack your sequences later you can choose the best out of that session so you might end up with twenty images of the planet but one of those in particular had great conditions and the same cleared up and that's where the luck part comes in and then you can take that one frame that was better than all the others and use that as your final still image of course that also means you can put it together as an animation later which is also really great depending on your process you might want to consider using a luminance channel now you can either do this from using no filters at all and just a single mono channel or you can use something else like an IR filter then you layer your color over that luminance layer later in post-processing and that can also help get you good results it can be really hard to find that really sweet color balance later on you'll find that your channels might be green biased or blue biased but I really like to use auto color in Photoshop that means it will level out all the color channels based on their histogram make them even and I find it produces a really even neutral result getting rid of noise is half of what we do in astrophotography that's the point of stacking but you'll probably find that you end up a little bit of noise leftover I use topaz as a plug-in in Photoshop and I find it works really well I use it at about a level of 6 anything more than that you start to lose a little bit of detail but topaz is a really good filter for keeping that detail but also getting rid of that grain and noise the final step you should be doing is applying wavelets or sharpening some people like to use the wavelets in regi stacks there's also wavelets in pigs in sight which I won't go into in this video in great detail but essentially what it does is it sharpens up the edges and when you sharpen up the edges a lot of those surface details start to pop out I like you smart sharpening with really liberal settings in Photoshop and I find this gives a really decent result [Music] bonus tip for those of you imaging Mars and Jupiter these planets rotate fast enough that if you image them over the night you might end up with the planet in different stages of rotation and what you can do in window pose is D rotate those images the part of the planet that's closest to you is always going to be the sharpest and the part around the edges are a little bit blurred so by D rotating you're you're taking three images where the surface was in front or to the left or to the right and you're essentially stitching them together so you get clarity all the way across the planet but that's an advanced technique so I'm not gonna go into that in detail it's not something I've even got my head around [Music] so those are the tips I hope they help you have any questions leave them in the comments below thanks for e support guys until next time this is Ben star stuff with Dylan O'Donnell bye [Music]

Channel: Dylan O'Donnell

Views: 145,068

Keywords: dylan o’donnell, astrophotography, planetary, planets, photographing space, cory schmitz, zwo 174mm, jupiter, mars, saturn, venus, neptune, uranus, auto stakkert, fire capture, derotation, twenty tips, 20 tips

Id: k1uBT3lrzgI

Length: 11min 13sec (673 seconds)

Published: Fri May 11 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/dylanodonnell]

Here is a quick video tutorial for getting the best photos of planets possible with the gear you have.