How to image Jupiter: Using PIPP, Autostakkert, Registax and GIMP

hey everybody it's michael again with late night astronomy and i'm out on a beautiful night to image my favorite planet jupiter it's cloud belts great red spot and galilean moons make it a unique target every single night of imaging in today's video we're going to take a look at the basic steps that you need to take to capture footage of jupiter and process it using free software so that you can create incredible images of this planet to share with your friends and family if you enjoy this type of content please consider liking this video and subscribing to this channel and most importantly let me know about your questions and experiences imaging jupiter in the comments section below let's get started by connecting our equipment to our telescope [Music] for tonight i'm going to be connecting my dslr directly to the telescope using a t-ring and extendable camera adapter at the end of the extendable adapter i'm going to connect a three times barler lens you may want to consider a two times barlow lens depending upon your telescope and imaging equipment this barlow lens will provide proper focus for my telescope and image sensor along with tripling my focal length to bring out more detail in jupiter particularly during evenings when sky conditions are clear and steady if you're using a smartphone simply connect your smartphone to a camera adapter and place the lens of your camera over a medium to high power eyepiece to capture your footage of jupiter [Music] set your dslr to manual and open up the main menu make sure that your camera is filming at the highest frame rate available which for this model is 60 frames per second i've also got my shutter speed set to 60 and i've found that good isos for jupiter tend to range from 800 to 3200 for this specific camera it just depends on the sky conditions that evening be sure not to forget to change the picture style to neutral and the white balance to daylight now that our settings are locked in let's switch over to live view to find the planet once you have found jupiter with your telescope you will need to use the digital zoom feature at five times or ten times magnification and as the object moves through the field of view make fine tune adjustments to your telescope's focus until you are pleased with the sharpness of it now reset your telescope to allow jupiter to move through the entire field and press record right as you start to see it appear [Music] be sure not to touch anything while it is recording i typically like to get at least 10 passes at a planet trying out different iso settings along the way just be sure to always double check your focus once it passes out of the field of view stop the recording and review your footage after a great night out imaging and viewing jupiter we're back inside for the next step of the process this is going to involve four free pieces of software that i'll be sure to leave a link to in the description below through this software we're going to process stack and enhance this footage of jupiter to bring out some incredible details let's get started well the first thing we're going to want to do is begin by reviewing the footage that we actually took of jupiter so i've got my folder up here already organized into the three best isos that i got for imaging iso 1600 and 3200 for tonight it was a little bit overcast and the iso 800 as you can see came out just a little bit too dark it's almost actually impossible to see right here if we go over to iso 1600 we have a much more recognizable view here of jupiter we can actually make out that we got the red spot tonight so it's pretty cool getting the great red spot i did not know that was going to be visible this evening but that's still a little bit too dim for the conditions that we had tonight so most nights i probably would go with 800 or 1600 but i think the iso 3200 footage is really going to be the sweet spot this evening yeah that's an excellent view of jupiter that we have and it looks to be pretty clear and steady skies for this roughly 45 second clip that i got so we're going to go with this one so we've got the iso 3200 footage and the first thing that we're going to have to do is run it through a program called pip planetary imaging pre-processing this is going to make sure that the footage is able to be used for every step to come so i'm going to go up here to file click add file and it's already here in the folder where i've got the iso 3200 footage of jupiter now you're going to want to make sure that you click on planetary because that's what it is we're shooting the planet jupiter and there's not much else that i'm going to change in terms of what is already here the footage that i have tonight is pretty straightforward it's jupiter just moving across the field of view so i'm not going to have to do too much to it just to be sure though make sure that you've got your output set to avi and that the avi file option is raw uncompressed things different than that i've had trouble with in the past so from that let's click on start processing so pip has worked its magic and just to make sure let's go look and see what it actually did so we go back to our jupiter folder we now have a pip folder here and we can see that our image of jupiter that used to have it moving across the field of view has now been centered so we have jupiter that is framed that is in the right format to be used for all of the steps left to go so that's exactly what we want to see so i'm going to close out pip and go to our next free software which is auto stacker three i'm going to begin by opening up the file that we just looked at here go to the pip folder and then bring that into the software you can see it framed here very nicely we're going to go over and we're going to click analyze now this is going to go through and basically judge the quality of each of the roughly 3000 frames that were captured earlier in our video and we've got some pretty good data here so if you go over here you'll see to the far left that this is going to be the highest quality frames and then over here to the right will be the lowest quality frames so the question then becomes how many frames do you want to have in it do you want it to be something like 25 right here 50 75 it's going to be a judgment call depending on your footage um if you see a dramatic spike down at any point of the curve that's where you're going to want to stop it so i definitely wouldn't want to go over here and do a hundred percent but this is pretty good footage so i think i'm going to do something like 90 percent of the frames being kept for this just to see how it turns out so once you've determined that you're going to go over here to this window and you're going to want to place the alignment points so that it knows exactly what it's looking at so let's do place ap grid all right that's a pretty good starting point you can adjust the brightness here to maybe get more of them or fewer of them it depends on how bright your object is but that looks pretty good we could go up here and make the alignment points smaller but you really don't want to have too many alignment points i found that most of my best footage ends up being somewhere between 20 and 30 alignment points because you really want them taking up a good amount of the surface of the planet and overlapping each other so that they know what they're doing when they're stacking it so i'm pretty happy with this we've got 26 alignment points they're at size 48 the brightness is at 10. i think this is going to go pretty well so let's stack this footage of jupiter all right so auto stacker 3 has run its course let's go over here and check on the picture so we started out with this video of it moving across we had that stationary with pip and now we have this new folder here auto stacker 90 so this should be 90 of the best frames stacked into this image that is already looking like a better image of jupiter that's a pretty good start at this point but i think we can make it even better than that so let's go into now registax six and this is when really the the magic happens in terms of bringing out detail of it so we're going to go to the file that we were just at where we have the 90 percent of frames that are stacked and we have this much brighter image now of jupiter and there are a few things that we want to do at this point the first is we want to make sure that our colors are aligned so we're going to go over here to rgb align let's click estimate okay so that showed us that there was a little bit of a difference that it did in terms of the color so that's good so that's a little more aligned of an image next thing i like to do is rgb balance and this is going to be a pretty dramatic difference probably let's click auto balance that is a very big improvement much more natural colors let's go up here to histogram so the histogram can be confusing the first thing i normally like to start to do for an image like this is cut it off at the end right here maybe around 20 or so so let's click stretch for that okay so that brings out a lot more of the histogram curve now you may want to leave it where it is you may want to move it in a little bit i like typically having some room to work with with the histogram at the end so i'm actually not going to do anything else other than that first adjustment but i am going to leave this loaded up in the corner because it can tell us some good data as we're going into different parts of this so let's go over here to wavelets wavelets are incredibly powerful and incredibly confusing as to how they work you'll find a lot of different tutorials on a lot of different websites that will show you techniques i found that every single time i'm using wavelets i use them a little bit differently depending on the planet depending on the quality of the image so this is something that you're going to really want to experiment with to get out different versions of your planet but i'll walk you through a basic workload of what i do so i start by taking layer one and i'll bring it over here to maybe about 75 percent and we already start to see some pretty good detail coming out of the planet i'm going to push the sharpness up just a little bit maybe to 1.2 or 0.120 excuse me as i'm doing that we're starting to get a little bit of noise so i'm going to go over here and click the denoise maybe up to 0.20 second slider i'm going to bring layer 2 over to maybe 50 and again i'm going to go and sharpen this a few times but also get rid of some of the noise by denoising it as well layer three we'll do that around 50 as well maybe bring that up a little bit i'm pretty pleased with that you could spend all day going through doing the sliders in different ways but just for the tutorial right here i'm actually really pleased with how that turned out just from those steps and you can see as i unclick here what we're talking about in terms of the difference this is the original stacked image and then we add layer 1 layer 2 layer 3. i'm pretty pleased with that so let's go ahead and save this image all right we'll save this as registax jupiter and we'll x out of this so now we're going to go to the final step and that's going to be with now some of the color corrections i'm doing here you can do in registax but i found that actually using this program gives me gives me results that i think are a little more pleasing and a little more accurate so we'll go in here to our registax jupiter file that we just finished with and we'll pull that up now there are two main things that i do here in and they mainly involve contrast and saturation so i'm gonna go down here to brightness and contrast and just maybe push that up a little bit just to maybe bring out some details that might be a little too much let's bring that back a little bit yeah i like that that looks good and let's go up here to saturation just to bring out some of the colors that are already there we've got the cloud belt showing up how wavy and different they are the great red spot yeah that's good it's always a balance between finding something that looks natural and not overly processed that's going to be the biggest trick for all of these steps is making it look natural and not overly processed let's click ok i'm pretty pleased with that image let's go over here and we will export this as a tiff file or jpeg file whichever you prefer we'll do a tiff file of jupiter final image our original video of jupiter to this final image with the cloud belts in the great red spot i hope you all have enjoyed this tutorial and it's been helpful for you jupiter is by far my favorite planet to observe and image and the incredible unique features of the surface of this planet that we see in this image hopefully tell you exactly why that is thank you all so much for your continued support and clear skies from late night astronomy

Channel: Late Night Astronomy

Views: 21,319

Keywords: how to image jupiter, imaging jupiter, take a picture of jupiter, pipp, autostakkert, registax, gimp, astrophotography, pipp tutorial, autostakkert tutorial, registax tutorial, how to process images of jupiter, imaging jupiter with a dslr, imaging jupiter with a smartphone, step by step guide to image jupiter, planetary imaging, picture of the great red spot, galilean moons, largest planet, jupiter, imaging the great red spot, great red spot, astronomy, solar system, jupiters moons

Id: FQagPJ8pM7Y

Length: 16min 7sec (967 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 11 2020