How Planetary Photos are Processed
Planetary photos tend to be much easier to process than deep sky objects. To capture them, you want to get as many frames as possible. This is done by capturing video. If you're using a telescope that does not track the sky, you will take multiple videos between each nudge to get as much frames as possible. For targets like the Moon, Mars, Saturn, or Venus, there's no need to worry about length of capture time, since those objects don't rotate that quickly to ruin the photo. For Jupiter though, you want to keep the total capture time to about 3 minutes. Time more than that will cause blur in the detail since Jupiter spins very quickly.
In this GIF, you can see the rotation of Jupiter in just a 1.5 hour period. You can also see Ganymede and Io orbiting Jupiter. Ganymede starts from behind the planet and Io is starting its transit in front of Jupiter. This is why for this Planet, you want to keep total video capture time to less than 3 minutes since the details with the clouds will be blurred.
Planetary photos tend to be much easier to process than deep sky objects. To capture them, you want to get as many frames as possible. This is done by capturing video. If you're using a telescope that does not track the sky, you will take multiple videos between each nudge to get as much frames as possible. For targets like the Moon, Mars, Saturn, or Venus, there's no need to worry about length of capture time, since those objects don't rotate that quickly to ruin the photo. For Jupiter though, you want to keep the total capture time to about 3 minutes. Time more than that will cause blur in the detail since Jupiter spins very quickly.
In this GIF, you can see the rotation of Jupiter in just a 1.5 hour period. You can also see Ganymede and Io orbiting Jupiter. Ganymede starts from behind the planet and Io is starting its transit in front of Jupiter. This is why for this Planet, you want to keep total video capture time to less than 3 minutes since the details with the clouds will be blurred.
There are 3 software programs that will be needed. PIPP, RegiStax6, and AutoStakkert. PIPP will be used to put all the captured videos and process them based on quality of frame. PIPP will output a video file, which will then put inputted into AutoStakkert to stack all the quality frames. Input the image from AutoStakkert into RegiStax. RegiStax is a tool to increase sharpness, since the photo after stacking is usually a little bit fuzzy. After the image looks good with all of the adjustments, feel free to put it into lightroom or photoshop to change more things to your liking.
My Gear for Planetary:
My Gear for Planetary:
- Skywatcher 8 inch Dobsonian Telescope
- 25mm, 10mm, Celestron 2x Barlow
- Asi 224mc
- Cell phone eyepiece mount
- Samsung Galaxy S8