Astroblog: Planets in the scope

Saturday, November 05, 2005

Planets in the scope

Well, Mercury didn't turn out too badly, given that I was shooting a few degrees above the neighbours roof and being mugged by mosquitoes. This image is a stack of 15 AVI frames. I shot 30 but had to throw half the frames away. This makes it unlikely that I wll get any images of Mercury's crescent phase though. Still, I was able to see the gibbous phase of Mercury. I've included a shot of an ealier apparition, which didn't work out so well.

Venus looks okay though (I'm still hanging out for a violet filter). If I can shoot an image a week I might be able to make a nice animation of Venus going into crescent phase (look at blog subtitle, yeah right).

The turbulence seemed less this time round, but Mars wasn't crisper. Not bad, but not a dramatic improvement. Here I contrasted stacking a 1 second AVI (30 frames) and a 2 second AVI (60 frames). Stacking was done in Registax. The only processing is tossing blurred frames and adjusting the wavelets to 10.5 (I have no idea what that means, I just do it and the image looks better). Given what was supposed to be in view (Sinus Meridiani), I'm pretty pleased at the level of detail I got.

This image is one of the 60 framers, stacked in Registax, resized with PaintShop Pro, gamma corrected to 0.8 to bring out more detail and an unsharp mask applied. It doesn't look to bad if I say so myself, but it is a bit artifical. I'll have another go tonight if possible.

# posted by Ian Musgrave @ 1:03 pm