Our Moon Mercury Venus Jupiter Saturn Uranus Nuptune Pluto
MARS
9-13-03 about 11:00pm
RGB only on the left. The photo on the right is the same image as the left with no manipulation other than adjusting saturation (all three channels maxed). The blue areas are the most interesting. Generally blue will show more of the atmosphere than red or green. Notice both polar regions. Not sure why the Hesperia area also shows wispy blue.
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9-12-03 about 11:00pm about 11:30pm
RGB RGBL with IR filter on all but green
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9-11-03 about 10:30pm
RGB only. Very little post processing. Used a flip mirror system for the first time. A bit clumbsy to use, but I'll get the hang of it.
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9-6-03 about 11:30pm
A bit blurry. Polar cap definitely getting smaller. Shot with AV 3.14, f/20, exposed 35mm negative for L channel (bottom right). Fifty 640x480 fits images for each of the four channels. Registax picked the best. Rotated, merged and tweaked the RGBL in PhotoShop.
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9-6-03 about 1:00am
Shot at f/40 (9400mm efl). Hires. Homemade IR filter (totally exposed 35mm negative taped to bottom of a barlow). Best ? out of 50.
Ordered a filter wheel from SAC today.
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9-1-03 about 11:00pm
My first usable attempt at hires (640x480) fits imaging. Captured in Astrovideo8 with long exposure disabled. Only 10 images taken for each color. Stacked and wavelet processed in Registax. Merged channels, rotated and enlarged in PhotoShop. No color or other tweaking done. No luminance shot due to it being extremely over exposed in preview. I think I'm going to like this.
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8-31-03
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8-30-03 about 12:30am about midnight
2 min @ 10 fps: r=217, g=117, b=167, l=244 2 min @ 10 fps: r=166, g=204, b=239, l=211
8-30-03 about 9:30pm 10:30pm
2 min @ 10 fps: r=362, g=977, b=221, l=338 2 min @ 10 fps: r=65, g=?, b=146, l=?
Tried f/40 again, but placing the target on the chip is extremely tough without an off axis guider or a flip mirror. Processing seems to be getting tougher too. Suddenly, when I rotate an image in PhotoShop, I'm getting jagged edges. I really need a filter wheel. Almost $700 for a Meade at Scope City. SAC has one for $150. More bucks. Hmm...
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8-28-03
Hand controller for motor drives blew up. $220 at local Scope City.
8-27-03 about 11:45pm
First shots at f/40. Bought a cheap 2 element Parks barlow. Stacked it with my less cheap 3 element Parks barlow. High thin clouds.
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8-26-03 about 11:45pm
Only had about 15 minutes of semi clear sky. I kept going outdoors to check conditions. Saw there was a clearing. Set the equipment up in record time. No color processing on the RGB. Only a bit on the RGBL to try to remove the blue/green ring around the edge of the planet. Two minutes each at 5 fps.
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8-24-03 about 1:30am
RGB RGBL
Three minutes each at five frames per second. Registax picked the best (red=91, green=222, blue=543, none=583) 1,493 out of 3,592 frames and stacked them. No other processing other than wavelets and gamma during stack process.
The above RGB ran through PhotoShop. The above RGBL ran through PhotoShop.
The color on the left looks more pleasing to me but the color on the right has been changed less.
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8-23-03 about 11:00pm
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8-23-03 about 1:45am
Two minutes each at five frames per second. Registax picked the best (red=295, green=263, blue=158, none=179) 895 out of 2,396 frames and stacked them. Played with hue, saturation and gausian blur on the RGBL.
Highly processed in PhotoShop of the RGB above. This is with L added and more processing to highlight features.
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8-23-03 about 1:30am
Each of the four images shot with K3CCDTools for two minutes at five frames per second (599 frames each). Registax picked the best (red=449, green=496, blue=81, none=284) and stacked them. I used the wavelets filters a bit and gamma curve. Then I used PhotoShop to rotate the images to the same orientation. Then merged the color channels. Then manually aligned the three color images. Then added the L channel, again manually. The manually rotating, and less so manually stacking, are some weak points of my processing. No other processing (color balance, PhotoShop filters, etc.) done.
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8-22-03 about 10:30pm
I might have mixed up the colors on this one.
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8-17-03 about midnight (late Sunday night)
Each color is a 1 minute avi at 5 fps (299 frames) shot with Astrovideo. Auto optimized and stacked in Registax. Registax wavelets are very cool but could spend all day tweaking it. Cropped, rotated and channels merged in PhotoShop. Judging by my older stuff, I may have overprocessed the 8-17-03 photos. I still have the raw avi's if anyone is interested. The composite photo with the south polar cap on top is for people who like to stand on their head.
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Older stuff
8-10-03
12:12 am 2:12 am
Unknown filter No Filter
These are some of my best shots. I have to take better notes. The only greens that I kept track of turned out bad, so no colors.
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8-9-03 early morning
No Filter Red Filter Green Filter Blue Filter
A neutral density filter was used with each photo except blue. Each images stacked from 299 frames (1 minute @ 5 fps), only the best 50-200 were kept. Various processing has been done to each one using Registax's wavelets filters. A lot more time could be taken with each image and the wavelet filters.
The next step is to combine the 4 images into one color image. Looks like Mars rotated too much during the time I was switching filters, refinding planet, refocusing, etc.
RGB RGB+Luminance+processing
The green must be the vegetation.
8-3-03 8-4-03
These are my first attempts at tricolor imaging. They are better than the second. At least with color.
These are photos of a map from the National Geographic Society, February, 1973, page 255a. I knew it would come in handy one day.