Sunday, March 18, 2007

Messing with K3CCD Tools - Saturn Image

Three nights ago, the seeing conditions were great, about 4/5. I spent some time out in the front garden experimenting with a freeware/shareware software package called K3CCD Tools. The thing that attracted me to it was that it took live video from your camera (including the Meade DSI) and then extrapolated the individual frames. It would then use a "wizard" to process the stacked images.

I took a single video of Saturn, lasted about 2 minutes overall, just for a test. I ran the image through the image processing wizard and here is the result. Decent sized image, with color that isn't too bad. It's not as good and detailed as the images others are taking right now, but it's a big step in the right direction I think.

I am hoping that a longer exposure will bring out some more color. This is just a 1 minute, 15 second exposure with about 75 frames taken out of it. Scouring the web, most of those nice colorful images consist of around 1600-3000 frames or so!!!! Next time it's clear I'll try for that.

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