Beginner Planetary Imaging: How to photograph the planets

[Music] okay so I've recently gotten into doing some planetary photography and so I kind of wanted to run through the setup and the process that I'm currently using in order to do that again I am using a celestron c6 with a canon SL - usually I put a Barlow or two in front of it to kind of boost the magnification some from just the native resolution so something maybe like a 2x Barlow so maybe even doing it like a 3000 millimeter focal instead of a native 1500 but generally speaking that's the overall setup and using this on a manual off phase mode it's actually the Explorer scientific Twilight OneNote so I have to manually track the planets as I do the video but that's kind of a magic of using the software afterwards is that you can basically use a manual not like this manually track it you can have it you know get jiggly move off frame but you can easily eliminate all that you know all those bad segments when you compile a a set of video frames together to produce a fairly nice composite image and you can see here again a sample of the raw video and then see here what the final result can look like you know using again sort of this a very basic setup and again I Canon sl2 is not the ideal camera for doing planetary photography there are dead it you can get dedicated cameras that are much better and certainly a 6-inch aperture is kind of fairly limited as well and obviously a manual altes mode adds further complications with you know that had not having as much stability and that kind of thing as well so again not the ideal setup this is basically what I had to use at the moment and so I wanted to kind of run through the overall process of how I handle this video so the video coming out of the camera is an mp4 format and so you do need to do some conversions and in order to actually process it and some additional software and so the first step in the process is to use pip I'll open that up here on the screen and in what pip does is it helps to convert the mp4 video to an AVI format which is easier to use down the road and so basically this is actually running on a 12-inch MacBook but it's all Windows software that I'm using so if using a Windows computer you can download the software and run it natively I'm using a pip Auto stacker and regista X all of them are right all these are available for free and so it's fairly straightforward get going and doing some planetary photography and burning all these in wine bottom line which is sort of an emulator to run them on the MacBook so against a 12-inch MacBook so not the highest powered computer by any means but it does a fairly decent job handling this data so we'll go ahead and start here okay so the basic settings you need to use with pip are to make sure you select optimize options for planetary and that will pretty much get you where you want for most things we'll go ahead and go to processing options see again make sure it's object planetary you can do this cropping which is really helpful for reducing the amount of data so we'll do test options and see what that looks like and and so here in this window down here you can see now that this is basically the data you're going to get is when a crap on all the extra blank space around Saturn and it'll give you sort of a smaller a smaller chunk of the video to work with for further processing which will speed things up dramatically when we're doing the stacking and everything else you have a smaller set of data and you can see here this initial frame was quite bad but it does put it right in the middle and that's one of the other nice features is that it will not only do the video conversion to avi but would also it will also Center the planet and it will crop the data which is quite helpful so once we do that was going to do processing and we'll do start and it's going to go through two thousand nine hundred and eleven frames and it does take a couple minutes here to go through all that again there's a 12-inch MacBook running window suffer in emulator so it is not the fastest solution but it's not hugely hugely long again it takes a couple minutes and it'll get through this this initial step so now this is done so we can go ahead and close out pip and that will jump to auto stackert and we'll go ahead and open up the file that we produced if we can find it so it should be in this raw video here's this pip folder that I just generated and there is no the same file that we had before but now it's an AVI file format again and say cropped a cropped video so we'll pull that into artist a Kurtz will run the analyzed here and now what it does is it produces a nice graph that basically has a data sort of sorted between best and worst frames and so now it's a you remember initially that initial frame was quite bad now it has one of the better frames here at the start on this side panel you can scroll through all the frames and order of best to worst and kind of decide where you want to sort of draw a cutoff line where these files typically I do about 70% again that if I've had tracking - probably like 80% if this thing is completely terrible you might do less but I'll go ahead and keep it as 70% for this one I'm also using this 1.5 X grizzle and what I'm sort of doing here is making the image a little bit larger in physical size here it's basically over these kind of basically upconverts the the scale and then when I do some processing later on I'll go back and then shrink it again and it seems to come out slightly better when I do that versus keeping it at the same size the whole way so it like this be sort of an optical illusion I don't know but it seems to perhaps help a little bit and I'll go ahead and we have to select our points here so what most accurate does which is really cool is that it not only stacks the images but it actually takes the be 70% best images for each one of these boxes and then basically produces the best possible image within each box and then it stitches the whole series of boxes together to produce one final image so in this case here it's using what looks like 28 points actually we'll do close to edge here - I think that typically helps the edges a little bit but so now it's using 37 points and so it's going to find basically is gonna basically produce 37 small images that are the highest quality from the 70% of the best frames and then this two shows are going to make one composite image which will you know again we have much higher quality image than what these raw images are here that you've seen so once you do that you can go ahead and hit the stack button and this will take several minutes to go through and produce all those individual images that are then stitched together and so you can kind of see we'll see here at the end how long this takes but it will probably take at least a couple minutes okay and so now it's finished up and you guys did take a few minutes to do and one thing that you should do if you're doing this is actually go through and try different combinations so you might try using a lower frame percentage or a higher frame percentage and produce multiple sort of you know final parts that you can pick the best you know the best one from so every time you you run video through here it you know the percentage like that is the best will will vary depending on the quality of a data coming in you know how this thing wasn't that kind of thing and so in certain planets like Saturn really need more frames than other planets do typically and really probably more than what I have here to get a better image but basically I'll leave it here just for this example at 70 and we'll kind of go from there and do the further processing and and this is what the image was coming out of out of auto stackers so you can see it's a much smoother picture here you can see the Cassini division quite easily and it's still pretty fuzzy because there's a lot of stacked images that are you know not maybe exactly perfectly aligned you know whether there was a lot of noise in the data that was kind of smeared out but you can see it's a much better image than what it was coming in so now we can do some sharpening to really bring out more detail and to do that we'll use regista X your artist axe can do stacking as well but auto psycho does a better job generally and but the big thing about artist acts is it has the wavelet sharpening which really can can really improve your images dramatically from what they do from what they initially look like coming out of auto snacker so we'll go ahead and find that an image here that we just produced so it was this one here bring that in here and and this is a lot of just sort of playing around you can basically do all these different settings for the noise and you know it kind of again will vary every single time you do an image you know what the best setting is it's not gonna be the same all the time and so I'll kind of go ahead and just use sort of a default thing that I typically do and that's to basically go through and do kind of like a gradually descending series of sharpening in denoise I'll go through and do point six point six and I'm do point five point five so something like this usually works out you see actually looks worse now but once we move these sliders around and that'll change quite a bit and so usually I'd put this first slider somewhere right around the middle and you can see immediately that brings out quite a bit more detail and then this next one I kind of just decrease them as we kind of go down to the row here and so I'll just kind of gradually fade these these down if you bring these Flyers up too much it's kind of this balance of you know over brightening some of the blowing out some of the details and it maybe not showing enough a lot of times I'll go through here and do is drop the contrast down a bit and drop the brightness down a little bit 127 with and 130 hmm 3-0 yeah to kind of help with that a little bit also I will go ahead and flip and rotate this kind of counteract from the telescope view there with the mirrors and and you can play around with this with the RGB balance what one thing there is a little bit have that from atmospheric dispersion there is this blue tinge on the top and yellow reddish tinge on the bottom of the Rings and that's just from the atmospheric dispersion but but you can kind of see though you know you can play around with some of that with some of the RGB alignments and kind of cracked a little bit of that but I'm not gonna go through all that here you can play around a lot of these different settings and improve things a little bit more from what you see here but you can see this is dramatically better from what we started out with so you can see here now I'll go ahead and say this image first well actually we're gonna do here before I I'm gonna go ahead and let's see resize the image I forgot to do that here again I up converted it in the auto snacker I'm going to go ahead and shrink it here to 75% and this one it resize and then we'll go ahead and save the image and so you can see this is much this is not you know obviously the best picture of Saturn you've seen but again from a Canon SL to the Celestra and c6 and so really quick walk through the image processing I could probably do this a little bit better if I play her out the settings a little bit more but this is a much better picture and you can see it's a pretty decent you know overall image you know coming out of that setup so again this is just kind of a quick summary of how you can process your your data using the combination of pip auto stacker and Raja Stax and so even using a simple DSLR camera a canon SL 2 is one of their very low end you know DSLRs as well so again not the best quality camera you could possibly use for doing photography or do it for doing planetary photography but you can still get some pretty nice results out of out of a setup like that so I kinda wanted to run pretty process of how I do that and I'm so a beginner it sort of at this process and obviously I'll try to figure things out is you know improve things as I as I go along but I just wanted to share if you're getting started out yourself an overall process that might work out pretty well for you to produce some decent looking imagery out of a fairly basic camera and telescope setup so so anyway that's all for this video and thanks for watching bye [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Earth to Space Science

Views: 31,111

Keywords: astronomy, astrophotography, planets, planetary, imaging, planetary imaging, photographing planets, how to take pictures of planets, PIPP, Registax, AutoStakkert, image stacking, how to process planet video, lucky imaging, planetary photography, photography, imaging planets, saturn, solar system, canon sl2, celestron, C6

Id: j1xmiJ1dkE0

Length: 13min 3sec (783 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 22 2018