CCD vs Film? Lots of time vs no patience? Alright, this is your place to discuss all the astrophotography what's and what's not. You can discuss about techniques, accessories, cameras, whatever....just make sure you also post some nice photos here too!
Been occupied with processing Jupiter lately. It is certainly some "siong" work. Lots of processing time spent and hard disk space spent as well. A little more time was spent into focusing and also quickly taking individual colour channels per frame. I think planetary processing is more involved and more difficult than deep sky processing when u wish to do it well and detailed! Here is a second light attempt of jupiter plus a little animation.
Wow, your these few sleepless nights paid, excellent job. Wait till you complete the full rev of Jupiter with the great red spot, that will be wow wow wow.
Here are a couple of follow-up still images that were originally used to piece the above animation. Image details can be read off from each image's lower left. All were done at an FPS value of 30, and exposure of 1/30seconds. Found that any faster frame rate and shorter exposure would not capture sufficient signal from the planet and noise dominates. If the seeing is bad, Jupiter can be captured at an FPS value of 15 but that would be a compromise on the number of frames to stack per channel. The length of capture per channel was experimented and varied from 50 to 55 seconds. However, for my system, an optimal exposure length was around 50 seconds. 55 seconds would render rotational smearing evident. It was still possible to process the smearing out, but would give an obvious edgy effect on the planet's peripheral disk. For tri-colour imaging of Jupiter, the entire capture session for each set should be less than or equal to 150 seconds plus a leeway of 5 seconds of filter changing time per channel, which makes it 160 seconds total or lesser, to avoid rotational smearing. From this learning, results can be improved by either having more signal captured per sub-avi frame, have a more sensitive camera with lower noise, or to have more stacks. The seeing variability was fluctuating throughout the session. About 14 sets were taken within a time span of 2 plus hours starting from around 2AM on that night. As Jupiter rose up, the seeing appeared to better at the same time (as we go into the wee hours of the night) and the atmospheric distortion hindering the quality of the image lessened. However, there were still periods of time when the seeing effects worsened. This had an imbalance effect on each colour channel per set. Sometimes the blue channel would be very bad, and the consequent red and green was good. This resulted in variability in the final image set. I have extracted a few better results below. Have also included the standard image capture information and Jovian central meridian references plus altitude values for your interest.
Will wait out for next weekend when there is a GRS transit (i think it is incidentally on a Saturday!).
, moderator can remove?