Jupiter - a first crack

For my first post I thought I’d have a crack at Jupiter. I might put together a better tutorial on Registax 6 at some point, but here’s a first go to test the format of posting a "journal" of my steps.

I used my Orion webcam at the prime focus of my telescope – at some point I might cover the tips and hints to get a good focus /alignment and all that jazz.  The webcam captured the image of Jupiter over a period of about 3(ish) minutes or approximately 1800 frames.  The details of the capture are given below:

Resolution=800x600

Frame Rate (fps)=10.00

Colour Space / Compression=RGB24

Exposure=13

Brightness=31

Contrast=136

Hue=139

Saturation=129

Sharpness=119

Gamma=67 

Below is an example of an 'untreated' Jupiter frame:

I then used Avidemux (I think) to convert the captured video file in .avi format to a series of jpegs – I’ll cover the capture and up-front processing another day.

In Registax 6, I used the following settings:

Align: 

Alignment parameters: Min distance 5: min distance from edge 20            

Intensity: 3x3 area; low 5; high 230 – 27 alignment points (APS) used.

Best frames: 1000

Stack:

Normalisation of frame intensity

Correct geometry

Stretch histogram after stacking

Wavelet:

Use interlinked wavelets

Parameters below:

The final image of Jupiter, with brightness levels tweaked in Gimp - will also cover this someday.

An improvement? - yeah, I think so but plenty more tweaking and learning to be done.

UPDATE: Used the same data and played around a little more with the Wavelets and number of frames.  Key difference in the below image is that I only used 1000 frames to begin with to avoid planet rotation screwing up the detail.