Mars

A couple of nights with above average seeing allowed me to acquire these two images of Mars. These are about a month past this years very favorable opposition so I'm pretty pleased with the results. Camera used: ASI178MC with Meade 2X Barlow and Celestron 8/AVX. Each image was stacked and wavelet sharpened from the best 20% of 3000 frames acquired at 60 fps. Frame size was 1024x768. Each image is labeled with date and time. 

Mars.11072020.21_55_01

Mars.11102020.21_46_49

Multi-Unsharp Mask Sharpening

Until recently I stacked solar system images with Autostakkert!3 and sharpened using wavelet sharpening with Registax. I don't like depending on Registax since it's no longer supported. I decided to experiment with multiple application of un-sharp masks to wavelet sharpen. This approach was inspired by an article "How Unsharp Masking and Laplacian Sharpening Work" by Keith Wiley

A series of Paintshop Pro commands can be saved as an editable Python Script. I saved and modified such a script with a for loop that performs  un-sharp mask repetitions. Number of cycles, radius and strength are settable parameters. A medium denoise it applied after the un-sharp mask cycles. After the script I applied chromatic aberration correction. 

Before and after sharpening images of the Copernicus crater appear below. These images were acquired on a night with the moon just below the celestial equator and with average to below average seeing. 

Ten cycles of  un-sharp masking with radius 2.0 and strength 35 were applied followed by a median denoise with aperture 1.  Close examination of the post script image suggests using the PaintShop Pro built in chromatic aberration removal tool. 

Scripts have also been created for Jupiter and Saturn. More on these in the future as I'm still experimenting with settings. 

Unsharpened 

Wavelet Sharpened

Jupiter 08/09/2020

Back in MA from MD it sucks that I have to quarantine for 14 days but that's life in the era of the Covid-19 virus. I can't get to my favorite local park site with Jupiter and Saturn in prime time. At least I can catch a few imaging glimpses during the short window when the gas giants are between increasingly view blocking trees in front of my apartment terrace. Below is an image of Jupiter taken just after midnight 08/09/2020. 

Seeing was pretty mediocre and building tremors from air conditioners throughout this wood frame building contribute to the blurring and misshaping of Europa. It also didn't help that polar alignment was pretty rough compared to when at a site where Polaris is visible. 

The real value to this exercise was honing in on best settings for imaging the gas giants with the ASI178MC with the 2X Barlow lens. To the east I noticed the gibbous moon with Mars to its right looking quite bright giving me something to look forward to over the next few weeks of planetary imaging. 

Thankfully my quarantine ends right around new moon liberating to travel to my favorite darkish sites for DSO and gas giant imaging. Crossing fingers for clear skies then. 

Jupiter with Europa

Jupiter and Saturn 07/26/2020

Jupiter with Callisto's shadow and Europa to the right. 

Saturn

Recent Lunar Images 07/29/2020

These are my first lunar craters imaged with the new ASI178MC camera. Imaging format was 1600x1200. However, in the future, imaging format will likely be reduced, perhaps to 800x600 to focus in on specific craters and increase frames per second rate. A thousand frames were collected using SharpCap, 25% stacked in Autostakkert!3 and wavelet sharpened with Registax 6. 

Tycho Area

Plato Area

Copernicus Area

Clavius Area

Bullialdus Area

Jupiter and Saturn

It was July 19th. I finally got out with the new ASI178MC planetary imager. Actually, its the first night I got successful pictures. The previous July 15 was a total bust because I used the wrong imaging format and to short exposure times.

Anyway, this time I imaged in Raw16 and RGB24 paying attention to gain, exposure time and the histogram. For each image 1000 frames were acquired at 1600x1200 format.  Images were projected with a 2X Barlow. Back in Massachusetts, I'm in Maryland for July, I have a 3X Barlow I'll try in the future. I'll also consider a smaller imaging format to get a faster frame rate.

Jupiter 7/19/2020

Saturn 7/19/2020