Mars Dec 4, 2007

Hi all,

Here is Mars shot in terrible conditions. I post it because the second object in the image is my very first LRGB planetary image. The first object is colour shot with the SKY colour camera. I combined two red, the green and blue images from the DMK camera to create the final product. Throwing out the terrible seeing, I think the result is promising. I have a filter wheel on order and I am planning to do more of this.

http://web.gccaz.edu/~pmaxson/Mars/May-June07/2007-12-04-PWM.jpg

Paul Maxson

The topographic(?) clouds along the limbs are easier to see on the RGB shot, but the LRGB composite looks great.

Very nice!

Indeed Paul, it sure looks VERY promising!
I surely hope your seeing conditions will improve, to really see what you can do with this setup...

Keep it up! 8)

Paul,

I just got a DMK31 and am trying to figure out how to use filters and combine R, G, B into an LRGB as you have done. I hope you don't mind answering a few questions or maybe can point me to a previous thread discussing how to do this.

I assume you take separate videos of the planet through each filter, much as you would with a color webcam, and then run each video through Registax to create single, separate composite R, G, and B images. Is the next step to stack these separate images with Registax? or Astroart? or Photoshop? and 'tweak' the colors as necessary?

Additional questions I have are:

- Do you change any of the DMK settings between the R, G, B videos? Depending on the filter I used, some of my filtered videos of Mars have left the planet almost invisible and, consequently, hard to align in Registax.

- You mention stacking 2 Red images, were any DMK settings altered between the shooting of those two videos? Do you recommend doing this? Are you thinking of other combinations (ie 3 R, 1 B, 2 G, etc)?

- Do you also use the IR image? Is this the L in LRGB or are you using a completely unfiltered video composite for the luminance image?

- Do you have a 'standard' length video or do you let seeing conditions dictate for you? Is the video length the same for each filtered and unfiltered video?

- What file format do you save each composite image in (FIT? RGB? something else?) prior to combining them?

I'm hoping to save myself some trial and error as well as produce images half as good as those I routinely find on this forum, so any help you (and anyone else!) can provide will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Chris Vinson

Cool, got some clouds!