 I've been living here on the top floor of a three-story building right outside of Boston for the past few years and one thing I've noticed is that from this wooden deck which I'm on right now it's self-facing and I have a really good view of the planets when they're up and setting an early part of the night and I've often just you know taken a quick look at Jupiter's moons through binoculars but for some reason it's never occurred to me to bring out my 10 inch subsonian telescope which is right here. Well the other day I changed that and I have to admit it it was sort of frustrating because due to this being an old wooden deck on the third floor if I just moved a muscle the whole view through the eyepiece was violently shaking for several seconds before calming down and that's because when you're very magnified like you would be with a big telescope in an eyepiece any small vibration or movement will have a huge impact on the view but with enough practice at saying like super still and just you know just really taking my time I did get it to work and I observed the planets visually for about 10 minutes before I really wanted to try to photograph them and I have a bunch of different cameras I could have used and in some ways the best would have been one of those like small sensor guide cams or planetary cameras from QHY or ZWO and I have some of those they capture frames very quickly they can do high frame rate because they go right to the computer and they're using a small sensor but keep in mind this telescope has no motors it's it's I have to manually re-center the planets to get them onto the camera's sensor and then the planet will leave the camera sensor just after a couple seconds so I'm really trying to do just very short bursts of video and so for this I think the DSLR is a better choice I have this old Canon DSLR 60D that has a very interesting set of video modes including one that crops into just 640 by 480 pixels into the center of the sensor in a one-to-one crop mode and that's ideal for planetary since it should give us much sharper results with fewer artifacts than a normal video mode which is taking the whole sensor area and compressing it down to a standard HD or 4k frame size but I didn't want to start in that special crop mode because then I would have had the exact same problem of using like a small QHY or ZWO sensor instead I get the planet all framed up and centered in one of the other video modes it's using the whole sensor and this way it's much easier to find the planet and then I just try to quickly switch to the crop mode and record a very short video before the planet leaves the frame now doing that while also not shaking anything was really really challenging and so you can see many of my attempts here did not really work out so well but I did have a few attempts where I think I got something usable um well at least considering how janky this whole setup was if we can get any surface detail on the planets after stacking I'll call this whole experiment a success and I should mention this telescope is the Skywatcher 250p FlexTube collapsible dobsonian you've probably seen it in the background of most of my videos it has a focal length of 1200 millimeters a focal ratio of f4.7 but I was using a two and a half times barlow lens attached to my DSLR with a t adapter here and so that puts me at an effective focal length of something like 3000 millimeters at f12 I do have to admit that I forgot to collimate the telescope which shows you how rusty I am at using reflectors but this is just for fun it's just a test run to see how well this works so I'm not expecting too much but the last part of this video I'll show you how we take these short videos that I made on the DSLR and process them with free Windows software to make a usable final image okay I've transferred the best movie that I could find of Jupiter and of Saturn onto my computer here and then I'm just going to drag it into PIP which is stands for planetary imaging preprocessor and I'm just going to make this really simple I'm just going to click on optimize options for planetary right here on the first page and then that turns on a bunch of stuff that I want for preprocessing a planetary movie like this so it's going to center object in each frame of the video which is something that I want to do it's going to do auto object detection if I test this you can see there it's finding Jupiter even though it's sort of out of frame in that first frame and if we want we can turn on enable quality estimation we can also of course do this in AutoStackert which we're going to be using next if you do do it here I would keep it at a pretty high percentage of frames kept at this point and then we can bring that down further in in AutoStackert in output options I'm just going to select a directory I'll just make a new folder on the desktop for this call it Jupiter and then I'll just click on do processing and then click start processing okay and if I look in this folder now get rid of this here is the original image and here is the video after pip has centered it okay and we're going to turn that into something much better but we have to first stack all of those frames to make it into one image so we're going to do that with AutoStackert here we go so I'll just open up the image that we made with pip and make sure that it says planet right there and then I'm going to you can manually draw control points onto here or alignment points I mean but I'm just going to use the place alignment point grid option and then click analyze okay and it estimates the the quality of all the different frames I usually have mine set up like this we're going to create a tiff we're going to do different stacks for 30 percent 40 percent 50 percent of the total frames turn on RGB align I'm not going to use drizzle and then I'm going to click stack okay that's now done I'm going to exit of AutoStackert and open up Registax and in here I'm just going to click the select button go back into my jupiter folder and now there's these three new folders from AutoStackert let's try the 50 percent one okay so that's out of AutoStackert just the stacked jupiter and it looks a lot you know smoother and less noisy than the video but now what we're going to do with this very smooth out stacked image is add wavelets processing so I'm going to change the wavelets scheme to dyadic from linear so we have dyadic Gaussian and then I'm going to start turning up these wavelet layers right here and what I'm trying to do is we're gonna I mean you can obviously see if I just turn this off and on that last one was most dramatic it looks like that the level three wavelets is where a lot of the detail is in this shot I don't know if I like what level four is doing so I'm going to turn that down a little bit you can see that if I try to add level five that's going to add a lot of ringing I might just turn level five and six off okay and then the other thing other than wavelets that I like to do in Registax is if you see any kind of we already did RGB align in AutoStackert but they also have it in here if you see any kind of issues there you can mess around with the red and blue channels I'm gonna add a little bit of denoising and deringing okay and now I'm going to click this do all to do all of the processing that we just set and then I'll click save image and save this off as a TIFF file okay and then I'm going to repeat that same exact process for Saturn okay and then I just brought the two photos into Photoshop and put them together to show the relative size of the two planets and just to did a little subtle curves and saturation that's it so pretty straightforward I you know you probably could do a lot more with better data but this is just a sort of brief introduction to planetary imaging I'm still learning myself and this was just sort of a practice run for me on the deck so hope you enjoyed this one until next time it's been Nico Carver at NebulaFotos.com clear skies