Following is a set of images taken to show the effects of different types of processing. These are some of the best images I've yet to take with my set-up and I wanted to see what I could really get out of them. Seeing was good, a bit of haze in places but not around Jupiter and there was a 1st Quarter Moon in the sky. All images were taken at f/32.5 using the Meade 7" LX-50 and a 2X Barlow lens.
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Image 1 - Raw Image - a single 0.15 second exposure. This is still better than many of the processed images I got in November. |
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Image 5 - Took Image 3 + Van Cittert deconvolution. |
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Image 2 - Single Image Unsharp Masking - I took Image 1 and ran an Unsharp Mask Filter in CCDSoft for this one, width of 3. Again, not too bad for a single image. |
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Image 6 - Took Image 3 + Unsharp Mask + Lucy-Richardson deconvolution. This to me isn't as good as the straight Unsharp Masked image. |
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Image 3 - Five 0.15 second exposures combined into a single Raw image using AstroStack. You can see more definition in the image compared to Image 1. |
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Image 7 - Took Image 3 + Unsharp mask + Van Cittert deconvolution. Much more definition throughout. This is a much better image than the preceeding. Click here for the full-sized image. |
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Image 4 - Took Image 3 and ran an Unsharp Mask Filter on it. Width of 3 for the unsharp mask. Starting to see more detail brought out. |
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Image 8 - Took Image 7 + another Unsharp Mask in MaximDL. Still more contrast and definition. This is by far the best image of the bunch and shows a wealth of detail. Click here for the full-sized image. |
As you can see from this example, processing can make a world of difference in the final image. Combining frames reduces the noise a great deal. Running the Unsharp Mask brings out fine details and the deconvolution cleans the image up and increases the contrast greatly. In the final image the festoons on the NEB are very clear, the SEB division and one festoon to the right of the GRS are clearly visible and the STB stands apart as does the NNTB. The dark spot in the GRS is also visible, especially in the full-sized image. Compare these to the early November images that were a single exposure and you'll see the big improvements from combining frames and increased processing.
