How to Image Mars at Opposition with PIPP, Autostakkert and Registax

no other planet has captured our imagination like mars from 19th century theories of canals on its surface to 21st century probes searching for signs of past life we're kind of obsessed with our little red neighbor and rightfully so about every two years the orbits of earth and mars fall into what we call an opposition this means that earth moves in between mars and the sun creating a close approach that can provide some incredible opportunities to observe and image its surface in today's video we're going to take a look at some equipment techniques and free software that you can use to take advantage of this situation if you enjoy this video please like it and subscribe to this channel but most importantly let me know about your questions and experiences imaging mars in the comment section below let's get started by connecting our imaging equipment to our telescope tonight i'm going to be using my dobsonian telescope it's eight inch mirror in 1200 millimeter focal length will be nice to bring out some up close and personal images of mars one important thing to remember is to be sure to give your equipment time to acclimate to the outdoor temperature before you start for an 8-inch reflector i normally like to sit the scope out about an hour before imaging once the scope is good to go i'll connect 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 barlow lens this barlow lens will provide proper focus for my telescope and image sensor along with tripling my focal length to bring out nice details of mars 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 begin by setting your dslr to manual and open up the main menu make sure you're filming at the highest frame rate available which for this camera is 60 frames per second i've got my shutter speed set to 60 and for mars i've had good success with isos ranging from 200 to 400 when it's at its brightest and closest to earth 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 move to live view to find the planet once you have found mars with your telescope you will need to focus it using the digital zoom feature at five times or ten times magnification as the object moves through the field of view make fine-tuned adjustments to your telescope's focus until you are pleased with the sharpness of it now reset your telescope to allow for mars to move through the entire field of view and press record right as you start to see it appear be sure not to touch anything while it is recording once it passes out of the field of view stop the recording and review your footage 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 each time after a great night out imaging mars we're back inside to begin our post processing i'm going to be using three free pieces of software that i'll be sure to leave a link to in the description below this is going to help me to format stack and enhance the footage of mars to hopefully sharpen it and bring out some nice surface details let's get started so the first thing we're going to do is preview the footage that we took at the telescope i've got it broken down into iso 200 and 400 and this is looking very promising this is the iso 200 footage and i can make out an ice cap and some land features that is the best view i think i've ever seen of mars that's very promising let's look at the iso 400 footage that's probably what i'm going to go with it's a good bit brighter i'm pleased with how that looks and i think that's what we're going to be using tonight for our processing you could go with either and in fact you probably should but for the purposes of this demonstration we're going to work with the iso 400 footage i think that'll end up being a little more of a pleasing result for this video today so the first thing we're going to do is open up a program called pip this program is basically set up to put the footage from the camera be it a dslr or your cell phone into a format that will work with auto stackered so i'm going to go in here to our iso 400 footage and select it and we can see here that we're working with 2500 frames so that's that's a pretty good starting point we'll click here on planetary and there's not much that i change here in terms of processing one thing you may need to do is uncheck auto object detection threshold and do a test detect of it 9 out of 10 times just having it be the default setting of auto will work but sometimes if you're working with a very dim planet or mars came out dimmer than it was in my video you may need to adjust this threshold so it actually knows how to pick it up but for today i think we'll leave it on auto detect and that should work out fine output setting to avi uncompressed all right let's start our processing on this footage so now that pip has run its course let's close out of this program and see what it actually did if we go back here to our folder we can see that we now have a new folder entitled pip so two things that this did that are very important number one it switched the format to something that works for auto stacker and number two it has centered the image of our planet it's kind of jumpy right now but the auto stacker program will take care of that but instead of having it moving across the entire field of view it is now centered which will help us with the stacking of this for the best frames that leads us to our second piece of software today which is auto stacker 3 this is going to take the footage that we just processed through pip and it's going to pick out the best frames to stack for the final editing of our image so let's go to open go to our mars folder go to the pip footage that we just previewed and we see here one of the frames up on the screen i keep the default settings to basically what it was when i installed the program and then i click on analyze so this is going through and looking at all the 2500 frames and it is going to rank them from the best frames or the sharpest frames that are over here to the left to the worst frames with the most distortion over here on the right and this is a pretty healthy quality graph i'm very pleased with how this turned out it was a very clear night and i think that's reflected in this graph right here so the question now becomes how much do we want to stack if you have a quality graph that has a really sharp drop off out of nowhere you're not going to want to go past that this one's very gradual i could easily do probably uh sixty percent fifty percent i'm interested to see though how these top frames do just by themselves so i'm actually just going to do 25 for this if i wasn't doing this as a presentation for the video i probably would go in and have it do 25 50 and 75 percent and then i would just go through and see which of those was the best in processing but in terms of this demonstration i'm just going to stick to the top 25 in terms of frames now i have to go over here to decide what do i want auto stacker to actually focus on on the planet and i'm going to begin by placing the automatic alignment points so this has brought up 34 alignment points which is too many than what i probably want i found that around 20 alignment points for most planets has worked well for me so the first thing i'm going to do is go down here to minimum brightness and maybe lower this down to about five all right so that actually increased our number up to 48 so what i'm going to do now is probably go and increase the size of these perfect so this has us at 22 alignment points which is a good healthy number the alignment points are large they're overlapping each other so that the program knows exactly what to look for when it's stacking this footage so we've got our alignment points good to go we've got 25 of our best frames ready to stack let's stack them now that auto stackard is done with its processing we can close this program and let's go back here and see what it did we've got our original video we've got the pip formatted video and now we have a new folder auto stacker 25. and we can see here we have a very nice looking image already of mars i'm very pleased with that and we haven't even got to the most important part yet of bringing out details so that leads us to registax 6 which is an incredible piece of software for bringing out fine surface details of the planets i'm going to go here to our folder for auto stacker click on this tiff file and open it up so we've got our work area right here i'm going to click to zoom in on it a little bit just to help you for what you can see and to help me with the processing the first thing i'm going to do for this planet is i'm going to align the rgb it's probably pretty close and pretty accurate but let's estimate and see what it does all right it adjusted it a little bit but it was it was pretty close already now the next thing that i do for mars is i come up here to the histogram i'm going to pull the ins the histogram in here probably to around 220 on this end i'm going to come over here and maybe cut it off around 20. let's stretch that and see what it looks like all right that looks good that's a that's a healthy looking image we've got a little bit of room to work here with the histogram i'm going to keep this loaded up so i can see what it's doing but we've got the colors not exactly aligned they're not exactly balanced i should say so let's go here to rgb balance this is the interesting one with mars if this were jupiter or saturn i would just click auto balance and be probably done with it but mars is so heavy in red out of the rgb that we've got to do something a little more with it this is going to come down to experimentation but for this camera that i'm using and for this image of mars i found that going in here and simply increasing this by two or three clicks on the red is really all i need to bring out that detail for the red planet for you it may be four or five clicks it may just be one click but this is going to be something you're going to have to experiment with with your image to see what is a good natural look for you and we can see here that we've got in the histogram the rgb aligned with a little bit of a hint of red being more than the others and that that to my eye is a fairly natural looking image now we're going to move over here to the wavelets and these are the incredible thing that registex does better than any other program that i've found for bringing out detail on planets how the wavelets work is very complicated and the best thing to do is just to mess around with them for your image and find what works for you there's really no one way to use them i'm going to begin by going here to layer one and maybe bringing this up to about 75 and we can see here we've got some good detail that's jumping out on the planet well i'm very i'm very pleased with that but we can also see here that we've got a little bit of distortion coming out on this end here now that might be from the barlow lens i was using uh it might be just the effect of the atmosphere of earth but i think we can clean that up a little bit so i'm going to go over here to denoise and i'm going to click that up to maybe 0.25 yeah that cleaned it up a good bit so we still have a good sharpening effect but it's not overly done let's go down here to layer two bring that up to maybe fifty percent i'm gonna click to actually sharpen this one a little more then i'm going to go over here and maybe click the denoise up to 0.10 then finally let's let's mess with layer 3 bring it up to 25 or so maybe sharpen that up a little bit and then also the denoise as well i'm very pleased with that and this is one of the best images of mars i've ever been able to get what you do with these sliders and how they work for you is going to really depend on your image and also your artistic taste i tend to really try not to over process it if you go in here and you just keep increasing the sharpening yes you're going to get more detail but your histogram is going to go crazy and it's just going to look like it's overly processed so finding a balance between what is real to your eye and what your imaging equipment picked up is really going to be the trick for this one final thing we can do in registex is come over to color mixing to perhaps add a little bit of saturation to our image and also possibly work a little bit with our lightness yeah i think that looks good from our raw original video of mars to formatting it through pip stacking it in auto stackard and bringing out some incredible fine detail of land features in registax we now have our final completed image of mars i hope you've enjoyed this video and found it helpful please let me know about your questions and experiences imaging mars in the comments section below thank you all so much for your support and clear skies from late night astronomy [Music]

Channel: Late Night Astronomy

Views: 9,163

Keywords: let's image mars, how to image mars, how to take a picture of mars, mars through a telescope, imaging mars, mars opposition, opposition of mars, mars close to earth, mars as big as the moon, how to use pipp, hot to use autostakkert, how to use registax, pipp, autostakkert, registax, astrophotography, amateur astronomy, astronomy, red planet, how to process images of mars, pipp tutorial, autostakkert tutorial, registax tutorial, earth and mars opposition, life on mars, mars

Id: icCGcwqiOuc

Length: 17min 0sec (1020 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 21 2020