Imaging planets with the Mak and the new planetary camera ASI678MC

I received my new planetary camera ASI678MC today. The small pixels (2 µm vs 4.7 µm on the ASI294MC) should make the planets 2.3x larger. Additionally, the smaller sensor should allow for higher FPS.

Before sunset, the skies looked a bit hazy because of smoke from wildfires.

I had trouble getting the auto-centering ROI to work on FireCapture so used ASICap instead. The ROI does not auto-center but it can be manually adjusted fairly easily. 

I started with Jupiter, got 17k frames in less than 90s. But the resulting stacked picture was really bad. Maybe it was due to the seeing conditions or the low position of the planet in the sky or the quality of the focus.

I moved to Saturn and got better pictures.

Later I took some pictures of the Moon. I used the Moon to get the best focus possible and went back to the planets multiple times. I also tried the UV/IR filter again (not sure if it helped). I went back to FireCapture towards the end and the auto-centering started working again. 

I also tried the 2x Barlow. With the smaller sensor and pixels, it was quite tricky finding and framing the planet with the photographic tripod. The pictures were bigger of course but a bit soft.

The biggest issue I had all evening is the lack of colors. Everything is green and looking at the histograms closely it looks like there is no red or blue. At some point, I thought I had misconfigured ASICap (turned off colors) but changing the configuration did not help. It was the same previous nights, but once in ASIVideoStack I chose "sun color" to make the picture more "realistic". That option was not working this evening until I switched back to FireCapture. But even when it works, it is still a monochromatic picture. I feel like I'm missing something.

Saturn (20% of 10167 frames)

Moon (20% of 532 frames) - Plato in the middle

Moon (20% of 960 frames) - Tycho in the middle

Jupiter (20% of 10680 frames)

Saturn (20% of 5298 frames)

Jupiter (20% of 10210 frames) - with Barlow

Saturn (20% of 2724 frames) - with Barlow

The next evening, I played around in Siril. First I tried restacking the video files but that did not produce different results. Then I simply used the image processing operations (removing green noise and wavelets) on the stacked image raw file produced by ASIVideoStack. I got some improved images.

Jupiter (20% of 10210 frames) - with Barlow - processed in Siril

Saturn (20% of 2724 frames) - with Barlow - processed in Siril