How to Image Saturn with a Telescope, PIPP, Autostakkert & Registax

few things in astronomy compare to seeing the planets saturn through a telescope for the first time i've had several instances of people walking up to the telescope looking into the eyepiece and truly not believing what they saw when the incredible rings came into focus in today's video we're going to take a look at some equipment techniques and free software that you can use to take some incredible images of this planet to share with your friends and family if you enjoyed this video please like it and consider subscribing to this channel but most importantly let me know about your questions and experiences imaging saturn in the comments section below let's get started by taking our equipment out for a wonderful night of imaging the glorious planet saturn the first thing you're going to want to do is give your telescope time to acclimate with the outdoor temperature this is going to vary for different telescope designs and sizes but for my 8-inch dobsonian telescope i'll normally give it about an hour outside before i begin observing or imaging 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 barlow lens this barlow lens will provide proper focus for my telescope and image sensor along with tripling my focal length to bring out more detail of saturn 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 saturn for my dslr i'm going to go into the menu and make sure my camera is filming at the highest frame rate available which for this model was about 60 frames per second i've also got my shutter speed set to 60 for saturn and i've had good success with isos ranging from 3200 to 6400 on most evenings don't forget to change the picture style to neutral and the white balance to daylight as well now that our settings are locked in let's move to live view to find the planet once you've found saturn with your telescope you will need to focus it using the digital zoom feature at 5 times or 10 times magnification 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 saturn to move through the entire field and press record right as you start to see it appear be sure not to touch anything while it's recording once saturn 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 even after so many years of observing an imaging saturn i still never get tired of seeing it each night let's move on to the next step of our process which is going to involve three free pieces of software that i'll be sure to leave a link to in the description below this software is going to allow us to process stack and enhance our footage of saturn to hopefully bring out some nice details of its rings let's get started let's begin by previewing our footage of saturn that we captured from the telescope i'm going to load it up here and we're going to see it moving across the field of view and this actually turned out to be pretty sharp footage we can definitely see the ring structure here maybe even some hints of a division in the rings we'll have to see if that shows up later i'm maybe even seeing a a cloud belt here which is not always the easiest to pick up for the hemispheres of saturn but this is this is a good start this is a good preview of what we took from the telescope and i think that's going to be the clip that i'm going to choose to work with for this evening session so the first piece of software that we're going to open up is called pip planetary imaging pre-processing and i'm going to start by clicking to make this a planetary option because we are working with the planet saturn i'm going to load in the clip that i just looked at a few seconds ago and it's going to start by doing an automatic kind of test of it so this is telling me that the software is picking up the planet it is going to know what to look for so the purpose of pip is two-fold number one it's going to put it into a format that will work for software that we use on down the line number two it's going to take the footage that we just saw of saturn slowly moving across the field of view and it's going to center it which will help it for the stacking process that we'll get to in just a minute so we've got 2514 frames of saturn we've got it clicked for planetary for it to follow it and other than that i basically keep everything to the default settings that came with it when i loaded the software onto my computer one thing that you may need to change is the auto object detect threshold based off of the test that the program automatically did when i loaded it up it's going to work but if it doesn't find your object or if you get results that you don't like you may want to uncheck this and do a test detect threshold and then move these numbers up or down until it focuses on your planet especially if you've got a telescope that has an image that is more dim of a planet be it saturn or any other you might have to do this but 9 out of 10 times keeping it on auto detect almost always works for me quality options stay the same animation output make sure it's set to avi and a dib raw uncompressed and then let's go over here to processing and click on start processing all right so pip has done its thing and we're going to x out of this program and let's go over and take a look at what it actually did so we had our first image here as we saw earlier our footage of saturn moving across the field of view what pip did is it took that and then made it a format that will work and it went ahead and centered it for us as well so now we have everything lined up and ready to go for the next step of our process which is going to be stacking the best program that i have found for this is auto stacker 3 and it is phenomenal software for dealing with the planets in particular so i'm going to go here to the pip footage that i had of saturn i'm going to click on it we see that it's loaded up here i keep all of the settings to default from how it was when i installed it on the computer and i'm going to click analyze this is going to go through and basically put a quality graph on each frame that i took of this original footage of saturn so we're going to have over here on the left the best frames that it took when the atmosphere wasn't jumping around when it was steady skies and when saturn just looked crisp and sharp and then you're going to have over here to the far right the frames that were the worst this might have been when it was slightly out of frame or moving out of the frame this might have been when the atmosphere was most turbulent so what you need to do first of all is really make a decision as to how much of the information are you going to keep if you only keep a small amount even at the highest quality you're not going to have much to work with down the road to bring out detail at the same time if you go down here and try to do 98 of everything you're going to get a lot of frames here that may be not exactly what you want to use so we've got a decision to make do we want to do something like 10 percent do we don't want to do 25 do we want to do 50 percent for this right here i think i'm going to go 50 now you can go up here to this box here and you can type in any numbers that you want in terms of percentages and it'll stack that and you can mess around with it later on and i would encourage you to do that but for the points of this demonstration here we're going to stick with the best 50 of frames so now we have to come over here and tell the software what we want it to stack or follow in terms of details on saturn so i'm going to click place grid we only have one come up that is probably because my brightness is not set correctly for this object so 25 is probably too bright for that so let's bring it down to 15 and see what happens all right now we're up to five getting a little bit better now we're at 12. now we're at 17 okay so that's better so now it's covering all parts of saturn from the brightest to the dimmest parts of it but those boxes are maybe a little too big for me for saturn particularly for saturn i typically like it to have more coverage than other planets so i'm going to click on 24 here that looks much better we're getting some overlap in the boxes which is what you want we've obviously got the rings the entire planet covered here so 20 to 30 for saturn is probably what i'm going to go with so we'll see how this works we've got everything else set to default here let's click stack all right so we've run it through auto stackart and let's go over and take a look at what that did we have our original video we have our pip video and now we have a new folder called auto stackard 50. and if i click on this here we can see that we already have a much improved image of saturn it definitely has some more work that can be done to it but it is a great improvement over the original video that i had and we haven't even got to the most important part of the process yet so this is looking very good already i'm very pleased with that so now i'm going to open up registax 6 which is a very powerful piece of software for planetary imaging i'm going to go here to my file that i just created auto stacker 50 and i'm going to open that up that is looking very nice i'm very happy with that so the first thing i'm going to do is go over here to rgb align i'm going to have it cover the entire planet and click estimate all right so this just did a slight shift for alignment but every little bit counts so we're happy with that next thing we're going to do is bring up the histogram now you can see here there is not much information at all on the histogram here to the right but a good spike to the left so that means i probably need to cut off part of this on the back end so let's make that just kind of at the very end of where that is and click stretch there we go so now we're getting data red green blue all the information here but we've still got too much dead area here to the right so i'm going to bring this into maybe about here let's make it an even 200. very good i'm happy with that you could bring it in a little more i'm going to leave this amount of space right here just to give me some room to work with later on but if you wanted to you could bring it in to maybe 175 or so and you'd probably still have good data to work with it just depends on how it is for your imaging setup i'm going to leave this loaded up just to give me some information down the road to make sure things don't get too out of hand when i get to some more detailed processes of this let's go to r g b balance and let's click auto balance that is looking like a very natural looking image i very much like how the colors were corrected with that sometimes with mars and other planets you have to tweak it a little bit but auto balance worked very well right here for saturn so that's going to bring us over to the most important part of registeak which is the wavelets you can find so many different tutorials on how to use the wavelets a friend of mine in my local astronomy club gave me the suggestion of trying out particularly with mars with great surface detail linking the wavelets and just kind of using them as the first three in that way for mars i got incredible results for that for saturn i've been using it the more traditional way but the main point with the wavelets is you're going to want to experiment with them read articles go to forums about it on cloudy nights and other places and just see what people are trying out and it there's no one-size-fits-all for it is what i've found so for saturn let's start by taking this up to maybe about 75 that is looking maybe a little a little too sharp let's bring it down to maybe around 50. click sharpen maybe once or twice and let's go over to denoise so you're going to have noise that's going to pop up in your image regardless of the quality of it but the denoise function can do an excellent job at taking out a lot of that that's a great improvement that looks very nice let's go over here to layer two and maybe we'll bring that up to about 25 or so do a little more sharpening there for layer two go to point one two maybe we'll go over here to denoise and click that up to about point two zero let's go to layer 3. maybe we'll bring that up to only about 10 or 12 percent but let's take the sharpening for this up to 1.3 or so and let's denoise it up to 0.15 i'm very happy with that image we've got the cassini division right here we've got a a cloud band a cloud belt going through to divide the hemispheres you can even make out a tiny hint of the bottom part of saturn breaking through the rings right there because of how they're kind of shifting their perspective with us there's one final thing i might do in registex and let's just go over here to uh to color mixing let's go to saturation and maybe just bring that up yeah that's great to saturation level four we start with our original video of saturn we put it into pip and we made sure that it was in the right format and that it was centered we then took it into auto stacker to pick the best 50 of frames to stack we finally brought it into registax for an incredible final image of this beautiful planet if you enjoyed this video and found it helpful please be sure to like it and let me know about your experience imaging saturn in the comment section below thank you all so much for your continued support and clear skies from late night astronomy

Channel: Late Night Astronomy

Views: 20,692

Keywords: how to image saturn, how to take a picture of saturn, imaging saturn, how to use pipp, how to use autostakkert, how to use registax, planetary imaging, saturn through a telescope, pipp tutorial, autostakkert tutorial, registax tutorial, astrophotography, the rings of saturn, image the rings of saturn, the cassini division, picture of saturn, photo of saturn, how to process an image of saturn, saturn, astronomy, dslr imaging, cell phone imaging

Id: 3PYX33oXRg8

Length: 17min 28sec (1048 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 09 2020