How to image the Planets: Using PIPP, Autostakkert, Registax and GIMP

hey everybody its Michael again with late night astronomy I'm out here on a gorgeous evening under my patio in my backyard to capture footage of the planets specifically tonight the planet Venus we're going to be going through a two-step process this evening that looks at the equipment and setup that is needed to capture footage of the planets and then how that footage can be taken to stack and create an incredibly sharp image of what you just filmed let's get started [Music] we're going to begin by capturing the footage of our planet you're gonna want to use video for this and you're going to want to use the highest frame rate that's available for your phone or DSLR for me on this canon SL - connected to the telescope that's going to be 1080p resolution at 60 frames per second I set my ISO and shutter speed to make sure that the camera has good detail coming through and then I move on to probably the most critical part of this process which is the focus focus is really hard to get and to keep when you're imaging the planets and it's something that you're going to want to check on throughout the evening any temperature changes or nudging of the telescope or the camera can completely throw your focus off and ruin the results of the video that you're taking you're going to want to have the planet move across the field of view from one end to the other for my camera here and my telescope and magnification that's going to give me about 60 seconds of footage Venus has set for the evening but the night has just begun for us what we're gonna do next is one of the most important parts of this process and that is take the video that we've captured of Venus using our telescope and the DSLR and turn that into a final image we're going to be using a number of different programs that are available to do this for free and we're gonna be working on this process right now they're gonna be four main programs that I'm going to be using throughout this process the first is going to be pip following that I'm going to be using Auto stacker to 3 and then register 6 and then some final image enhancements in we're going to begin by looking at the actual image that was captured tonight on the DSLR I took about five different images of this and this was the best one that turned out out of all of them you can even see here though how you have the atmosphere turbulence how you have the different waves that are going on with the image it's not the most stable thing that you'll see but this is what we're going to be working with the entire point of this process is to take the four thousand or so frames that were captured in this video and to pick the sharpest ones and then edit that down with processing to a final image of what Venus is going to look like so let's start by going into pip this is a really good software that's gonna get us to the format that we need to edit this down the road so we're gonna click on file and we're gonna click on add sources that this will take us to our image of Venus it's going to load up here with a preview that we're gonna X out of and you need to make sure that you click that it is a planetary image that's gonna get it set up to the parameters that we want for this I don't worry about much of anything else in this software other than the help put options which I pretty much keep to default with it being an avi file in a did RAW format and then I'm gonna go to processing and I will click start process [Music] so now that pip has worked it's magic we can go over to our folder here for Venus we can click on what it did and we can see the first results of that so it's taken our image of Venus moving across the frame and it has made it stationary so it's centered Venus to help with processing later on and most importantly it has converted it to an AVI file format which we need for step two of our process which is moving on to Auto stackert three Auto stackert is a fabulous image stacking processing source that's been put together I use it primarily for images of the moon of Jupiter Saturn Mars and obviously the image of Venus that I have tonight so we're gonna go to open on Auto stackert 3 we're gonna go to our folder that we're using for Venus and we're going to go to that pip file that we just created that's going to be the proper format to edit it you can see here the centered image of Venus that we're working with and we're going to go over here to this main tile here and click on analyze this is going to go through and basically rate each of the four thousand or so frames that our video was made up of and it's going to give us a quality graph this quality graph is going to be ranking the frames from the best highest quality which would be over on this side you can see here a nice sharp image of Venus over here to the lowest quality and you can see on this low end we've got kind of the wavy turbulence that's coming in that we saw in our original video now you have to make a decision in your stack options as to how many frames you want to keep it's going to depend entirely on the object that you're viewing on the quality of your optics and most importantly on how clear it was that night sometimes I'll click about 25% to keep the top 25 normally I do around 50% so we see here the graph here at 50% is cutting off the remainder of this but I think that's going to be a pretty good area and amount of frames to go with so the next important thing that we have to do is come over here and actually figure out what we want the software to do in terms of what it's looking at and we're gonna do that by clicking place the alignment points on the planet you can adjust this in terms of making them larger or smaller you can adjust the minimum brightness up or down to give you more or less of these I've settled on ten for this and that's going to give us one two three four five different align points and this is going to help the software to focus on those parts of the planet to pick out the best 50% of the frames that we have for this image so we're going to go and click RGB a line if that hasn't already been done and then we're going to click on stack [Music] so what this has done is it's basically taken the original video that we had and it has picked out 50% of the best sharpest frames that make up the image of Venus that were working with tonight so if we go over here to our folder on Venus you can see we have a folder here now that says Auto stackert 50% and this is what we have at least so far with how Venus is looking and that's a pretty big improvement from the original blurry atmospheric image that we had earlier but I think we can make it even a little bit better than that if we go into regice stocks this has a pretty powerful piece of this software which is the wavelets your wavelets are going to allow you to fine-tune and bring out sharp details in images so we're going to go and select the image of Venus that we have the 50% that was stacked and we're gonna open that up right now in registers I'm gonna do a zoomed in view to give you a better idea of what we are looking at here for it and let's just kind of play around with what we have here a good thing to start with would be going to RGB line which we'd already done earlier but just to double check it again it's showing that it didn't make any changes there we can then go to RGB balance do auto balance on this to bring colors more into how they should be and we can also go into the histogram and make some initial changes to that by stretching it at that point once we've gotten to this point we're gonna go over here to the most powerful tool of regista X which is the wavelets and you can see here how quickly that blurry image of Venus starts to bring out some tremendous detail just by moving some of these sliders around you're gonna have different things that you're gonna do for Eastin each of these images it's gonna be different for every planet there's no one exact right way to do it but this is just to give you an idea of what it looks like on a basic scale here for something like Venus so I'm pretty pleased with how that is already we can see the Terminator line of the clouds for the Crescent Venus and the shadow that we see from our perspective here on earth you've got some distortion here from the lens I was using but that's a much improved image from what we originally had from here we're going to go and save this image will name this reg astac s-- and we're gonna go open the software called this is an open source kind of free version of a lot of the things that photoshop does and it's one of the final things that I use to bring out some final details in a lot of my planetary images so we'll go to Venus we'll go to the registrar's file that we just stacked we will zoom in on it here just to give you kind of a better view of it and one of the only main things that I do in this software is go to saturation just to bring out some more color from it that's already there so we can kind of preview it and see just a little change in terms of the color it's not going to be dramatic it's not going to be a major thing just kind of a little bit of a change in terms of it I might do it one more time that's pretty good I'll go over here to export I'll pick the file that we want you could do TIF but for this we're just gonna do a jpg file just to save the final version final Venus will export it and then we'll see what we have here for our final results so we had this original image of Venus was the planet moving across the field and the frame right here that was distorted pretty zoomed out and the final image that we have here after 10 or 15 minutes of work is this right here pretty sharp pretty impressive image of Venus particularly for the telescope and camera that I was using and also for how rough the atmosphere was that night as well again this process works for the moon it works for Jupiter Saturn in Mars and this was hopefully just a quick tutorial to give you some of the things that I've used over the years that have helped me to bring out some pretty nice details and planets in a fairly short amount of time if there's any other software that you use to help you edit or come up with any images you've done of the planets or anything in our solar system please let me know in the comments section below I hope this has helped you out a little bit and as always thank you for your support and be sure to subscribe to late night astronomy you [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Late Night Astronomy

Views: 33,533

Keywords: A Step by Step Guide to Imaging the Planets, How to take pictures of the planets, Imaging Saturn, imaging Jupiter, Imaging Venus, Imaging Mars, Planetary Imaging, Astrophotography, How to use registax, how to use PIPP, How to use GIMP, How to use Autostakkert, How to process images of the planets, taking pictures of the planets with an iPhone, Imaging the planets with a DSLR, Using a DSLR for astrophotography, Late Night Astronomy, Autostakkert Tutorial, PiPP Tutorial

Id: zQYbtzsnQ3E

Length: 12min 47sec (767 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 30 2020