Venus (with a good scope)

[Kenny]

2nd attempt at Venus yesterday evening, through high altitude hazy cloud, this time testing the newly inherited OAS 8" Meade LX90 with my Celestron NexImage camera through x3 Barlow. 2 minutes video at 20fps captured with SharpCap2. Video stacked in AutoStakkert2 with only 13% frames (~60% quality). Smart Sharpened and minor curve adjustment in Adobe Photoshop CS2.

[Mike]

Venus is always a tricky one to get due to it's brightness and the fact it has an atmosphere. You've done pretty well there.

[RobertM]

I agree, it's a very good result.  Most would use a filter to improve contrast but even so it's unlikely you'd see much in the way of cloud features.

[The Thing]

Another good job Kenny. Never much to see on Venus unless as Robert says, you get into some fancy filtration.

BTW If you've got the latest Autostakkert it has an option to RGB Align which help as there is dispersion due to Venus relatively low altitude. You can do this on finished images in Registax too.

[julian]

Very nice

[Kenny]

Thanks all.

Noted re RGB align. Will give that a go this evening.

Robert - which filter is best suited for Venus?

[RobertM]

Kenny, it's an ultraviolet filter for Venus.

[The Thing]

The other filter that seems to recommended for all planets is an IR pass as IR is dispersed less and so shows a lot of detail (as opposed to the usual IR/UV blocker intended to stop stars bloating due to not being focused at either end of the spectrum by the optics).
This will only work if you camera doesn't have an IR blocker built in! They can often be removed if present, you need to check online for your Neximage camera. Usually it is used as a luminance layer because of this and RGB(+UV) laid over the top.
UV is at the other end of the spectrum so is dispersed more, a small bandpass filter will give better results (hence the use of a blocker for normal wideband use).

[Fay]

Very good kenny, mysterious looking!