Unfortunately, our home planet has an atmosphere. What we see of the universe beyond our tiny cocoon is distorted by sometimes hundreds of layers of different gaseous configurations. It impacts all of our telescopes particularly badly. The Hubble Space Telescope and its successors’ main advantage is not in size, but that they do not have to contend with the Earth’s translucent layers (of course those telescopes have their own unique challenges, but that is another story).
When I took my latest Venus pictures a few days ago, I created them by stacking video through PIPP, AutoStakkert, and RegiStax. I have not done this process regularly since late last summer, when I was vigorously imaging Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Since then I have attempted stacking only a few times, maybe two in January and one or two this month, all for Venus. Although I have the process mostly down pat, I do forget a few things from time to time.
My earlier picture of the ~5% illuminated Venus did not account for atmospheric diffraction. It pushes parts of the image to too much red and the opposite side to too much blue. I have noticed this condition primarily with Venus and Jupiter.
RegiStax has an RGB Align function which corrects this red-to-blue problem. I went back and ran my Venus picture through RGB Align, and above is the result.
What do you think? Does this look better than the non-RGB aligned Venus?
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