It's always debatable whether to do more sharpening, but I think this image could handle more sharpening. You'll lose some of the smoothness (which I also value and rarely see in planet images), of course. My attempt at sharpening is attached. I used the following techniques:
* Unsharp mask, with a threshold settings of 2, and radius adjusted ot bring out large-scale features by increasing their contrast. This is useful, because it sharpens without adding much graininess to the image.
* Another unsharp mask, with a radius of 1 (zero caused too much grain) but about half the radius of the first step. The smaller threshold sharpens more features at a small scale, again without hurting the grain very much.
* I used a selection smaller than the entire planet, and feathered about half the distance from the edge of the selection to the edge of the planet. This prevents the worst sort of edge effects from sharpening.
* I increased saturation about about 30%
* I shifted hue just a very small amount (about 7%) toward red to bring out color in the spot and increase contrast in the bands.
Ron Wodaski
The New CCD Astronomy
http://www.newastro.com
Attached Image:
