Planetary Image Processing - Saturn at Opposition 2021

hey everyone welcome to the channel today we're going to talk about planetary imaging and processing we're going to go on 830 mm journey to the sixth planet so stay tuned all right so first we want to do is download a software called p-i-p-p once you have it we're going to select our source video for this our capture and i have it here in this directory for me i saved as best saturn because i am narcissistic i think it's the best saturn video ever but that's not me to judge so this is what we got as a steel frame as a reference and what we're going to do here is go down to the bottom and select planetary this is a planet we captured if you got some other things like a close-up of the moon or a full disc of the moon or a full disc of the sun you're going to want to select those all right so let's go look at some of the processing options and input options here you may want to pause this and and have your set up pretty close to this make sure object and planetary is selected here go down to where you see cropping i like to crop my frames in a little bit closer because it's a lot black when you take a still of a planet plants are relatively small but this is personal choice here all right for output make sure you select avi output format and you're going to want to create a folder for where you want this uh output of pip to go but in essence what we're doing with pip is that we're taking the video of the plant that you captured and we're going to align everything up and re-center it so if it drifts across the field of view this will re-center it or if you have a manual alt-dash mount it's going to resemble for you just like if you had an equatorial tracking mount and even myself i have an equatorial tracking mount and i go ahead and use pip every time it makes everything a lot cleaner so in this one i have a long video seventy four thousand frames are captured it's a lot of data so this is going to take a minute or two to process and we're going to rejoin this when uh when it's done all right so it's did his thing and uh we're going to go ahead and go on to the next stage of our journey here and we're going to use a program called auto stacker to stack the best frames so this is what the pip does is centers the video for you so saturn's nice and centered in us in our field of view here as you can see the video i had i had to bump the gain up quite a bit it's very noisy but you're going to see through the magic of stacking frames the noise will go down dramatically and the signal is going to get boosted to a level you you wouldn't have thought possible just by looking at this but this is actually good data and you'll see once we get further along how good is this and there's nothing like looking at saturn in the labview it's something else um i captured this just at opposition on nate one so uh the rings were uh brighter than usual the sun's hidden directly on it so this is um it's going to show pretty brightly when we finished up our our process here so let's go back to uh open up auto stacker it's a free software all the software i'm using today is free so we're going to open up our pip alignment video that we took all right now here we are open that guy up so this is a pretty neat software make sure planet is selected if you're doing surface hit the other one now move on to the next window here we're going to apply our reference markers here and i like to use 24 24 seems to be enough for most purposes um i really ever exceed that maybe if i'm doing surface but plants 24 needs to be good number and we're going to hit this button here and place all those alignment points that's going to decide to determine quality so the essence of stacking what we're going to do is have this software run and analyze the video frame that we have and pick out the best frames and show us which ones the atmosphere has distorted to a degree where we don't want to use those in our file stack so it's going to do the analysis uh this takes several minutes to run depending on your processor speed and the amount of data and then we're going to go ahead and look at this and see so this is the final analysis that it ran and as you can see um in the histogram below everything above 50 is a lot so we're going to select for this one 30 30 of the best frames that's that little green bar there and uh once you stacked it go ahead and um save this as a stack up how you want it and we're going to open up another program called registex and this is going to um really bring a lot of the detail here uh it's almost like like magic so we opened up registrars here we're going to select our stack that we just did not a stacker here we are open that up so this is actually pretty similar to what saturn looks like in the eyepiece it's got this uh at least for my 100 millimeter refractor that i got data on which actually not that big of a telescope if you think about it uh it shows up like this it's a little bit of a faded muted yellow green tone right now um but you can start to see the casino division there and what we're going to do is um personal preference i like to level this one this saturn but you can treat it however you like so i'm just going to click on this little arrow button and kind of shift the picture around towards level and uh there you are so it's leveled there and now the next treatment is pretty cool um we're going to get rid of this green yellowish cast on here and go for the true color saturn especially at this time of year is pretty nice so what we're going to do is do what's called rgb red green blue balance and this is going to really transform this picture um to the next level it's a powerful tool it's not a hundred percent um but i find that um in most cases it works pretty effectively so here's the histogram that we're talking about as you can see the blues the reds and the greens are not converging and closely align with each other not in harmony so we do the auto balance button here this will clean all this up and really transform the saturn picture and just like that you've gotten the saturn all cleaned up showing its bright white rings at this time of the year it's at opposition and the seliger effect is in full swing that's when the the sun is hidden an object directly on and the somewhat obscure stuff is becoming brighter so the next powerhouse that registrex have is called wavelets so these are the uh the six different panels here we have in the left these uh really sharpen different areas of the picture and it's just a matter of uh playing with each one of these in order and walking them back and forth and there's no exact science to this we all as astronomers walk in image back and forth when we try to focus it so we find what's the most harmonious balance plus the sharpest picture it's no different with this so you're going to take these sliders over the first one is probably the most dramatic one as you can see it did already enough to clean it up and now you can see the casing division clearly there but we're going to play with some more and see if it's uh better or worse and often enough i tend to go back a little bit because um i don't want the image to be overtly sharpened or too hard sometimes the smoothness is is really where you want it to be i find it more pleasing and more satisfying that way but everyone has their own preferences and of course it depends on the data that you have too so um i was a fortunate enough to have a uh a five minute long video with seventy four thousand frames to play with so there's quite a lot of data we could do and we're going to bring up the little zoom in slider so kind of see what the bandings of or saturn is doing you can see that the color separation is more apparent now in the northern hemisphere you got a big belt there in the center that's that's yellow versus the more brownish and greenish appearances now we're bringing some of the detail on the bottom in the southern hemisphere the greenish blue is coming out so just play with these a little bit maybe walk it back too far and then when it's too far then you start going backwards i tend to do it that way i want to go past where i think it's good and then walk it back to where i think it's better so you want to go almost exceeding the limit of what is pleasing and then go back to when it's better that's where i finally get the most the harmonious balance going so it's just a matter of walking and back and forth not exact science here i'm sure if you've hit on a good preference here you could probably save this and then it'll be automatically available to you next time i just find out you know this is actually one of the more enjoyable processes here i like to do individually myself mainly every time it doesn't take that long to do it and i have some satisfaction doing this so here you are i think the uh what you next thing you got to do is do all button here that's very important you're going to apply the same formatting to every single frame that you've stacked and now this image is ready to save and that's really it guys um this is how you take uh a so-so video saturn which is very grainy as you saw we stacked it we stacked the best ones that we thought had the best chance of getting us a final image that is pleasing and then we really transformed them in red stack and i think this one is good enough for the gram this is good here we're going to post it all right so um you know i thank you all for uh joining us on this journey here to saturn processing the image

Channel: Urban Deep Sky

Views: 1,757

Keywords: skywatcher, telescope, planetary, imaging, astrophotography, hubble, pipp, autostackert, autostakkert, registrax, registax, stacking, saturn, jupiter, themoon, moon, evostar, evostar100ed, 100ed, ed100, opposition

Id: kV7PwmUcuHs

Length: 11min 34sec (694 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 03 2021