Processing Jupiter with Registax and Gimp

In this post I'm having a proper crack at Jupiter in Registax and Gimp, and documenting the process.  The post is for process steps only - play with any and all parameters until you get the image you like!  Below are all images of Jupiter produced from the same .avi capture.  Which is your favourite?

I)

II)

III)

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Processing steps

1) I took ~1800 (3 minutes) frames of Jupiter on Sunday 19th February 2012.  The capture parameters are shown below.  I used my Celestron 6SE with a Tele Vue 2.5x and my Orion Starshoot IV webcam.  The video was captured with SharpCap.

[D-PEN]
Frame Divisor=1
Resolution=1280x1024
Frame Rate (fps)=10.00
Colour Space / Compression=RGB24

The gain was set very low - just enough to show a little detail.  The image below is a single frame and demonstrates how the image appeared on my laptop.  Still playing with the contrast/brightness etc, but set parameters that make the image look reasonable.









2) Open the video in Registax 6.

3) Align the image and hit limit.

4) Stack, set the wavelets and align RGB.  Also play with the brightness and contrast..

5) Might also help to play with the histogram..

6) Autobalance for giggles?

7) Final Registax image - save as a .png somewhere

8) Open Gimp and load the image.  Adjust the levels

9) Adjust brightness and contrast

10) Despeckle the image (in filters)

11) Unsharpen mask (in fliters)

12) Adjust the colour balance

13) Adjust hue and saturation

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.