The Colour of Venus

My take on Venus this season. Not the best apparition of this bright but imaging-unfriendly planet. The planet was 8° 31' above the south-western horizont and was shining through the rays of the setting Sun. Atmosphere was... Unstable.

 

Top row: single frames, no adjustment, noise reduction and sharpening - off.

Middle row: stacked and deconvolved images, processing detail below.

Bottom row: as it may/should look like basing on what I have seen through the eyepiece with some bias towards my own predisposition.

The source of colour on single frames is solely atmospheric dispersion of light.

The source of bluish tint on processed panels is normalization, that was made at the final point of stacking.

 

Aquisition time (start of a session): JD 2456656.063241 (29.12.2013 17:31:04 MSK)

Image orientation: straight.

Equipment:

Canon EOS 60D (unmodded) straight or with Vixen Deluxe 2x Barlow lens on Vixen VMC110L Klevtsov-Cassegrain telescope mounted on photo-tripod via Manfrotto 410 Junior geared head (I like this head!).

Aperture 110 mm

Focal length 1035/2070 mm

Tv = 1/60 seconds

Av = f/9,4-18,8

ISO 500/800

Exposures: 16/46

Processing: contrast curve was set to linear for all images and images were converted to 16 bit clour .TIFFs, assembled into stack in ImageJ and separated into colour channels. Each channel was saved as .AVI and stacked in Autostakkert!2. Images were asembled into colour composites in ImageJ and subjected to Richardson-Lucy deconvolution in AstraImage 3.0 (Gaussian type PSF, size 2,2 units, 7 iterations).

 

So, ok, what is the colour of Venus? :)

Done