I am very happy with my capture of Jupiter near opposition from my back garden last night with GRS in a perfect position, a clear sky, pretty good seeing, high elevation, and moon Io appearing from behind the planet. Good to capture some detail, especially in the northern hemisphere. Taken with my Celestron C11 on a C-Gem DXII mount with ZWO ASI462MC camera and ADC from my back garden in light-polluted North London.


Here is my workflow which includes these six steps:

First, the night itself. Carefully COLLIMATE the telescope, every time. Bob's Knobs allows me to do this in 5 minutes or less. In Firecapture, set the ADC set correctly by increasing gamma and brightness to clearly see any blue/red fringing and eliminate this as much as possible. Focus again. And then again! Check for dew/clouds/seeing. Keep frame rates high, above 100fps but do not set the exposure too low or the image will get noisy - it is a compromise. Try and keep histogram to around 80%.  I set the gamma just under 50... Usually 47 and capture 45 seconds for Jupiter. Too much more with a C11 at 2,800mm and things start to get blurry with planetary rotation.

AS!3 settings: Laplace 4, Local, Double Stack Reference, 25% to stack, sharpened, RGB aligned, 1.5 drizzle, de-rotated in "experimental features" advanced menu (check coordinates in Stellarium), no blur, Discard Worst Global Frames in advanced menu. AP Points Close to Edge and MultiScale select 48 for small image captures.  AS!3 makes two files if you select sharpened, I set it to Blend RAW for 50% sharpening and RGB align. Sometimes the slightly sharpened "conv" file version provides for a better result before Registax wavelets applied. 1.5x Drizzle applied - there is very little quality loss from drizzle off, and I think the larger scale image provides some benefit.

Registax....Very gentle movement with sliders. I use Linear Wavelet Scheme.  Make an adjustment, and go back a tad. There is a box where you can select Initial Layer 1,2,3 etc. Worth checking and increasing to 2 with drizzled images. Adjust the Gamma carefully and use RGB Align and RGB Balance features. Do not over sharpen, back off if unsure!

PaintShopPro (or Photoshop if you are clever) for colour balancing, cropping, minor touch-ups.  Save as TIFF

Topaz Denoise. Do not over-use!  I sometimes, but not always remove some noise and add sharpening with Topaz. Never more than 1% on denoise or sharpening. It helps slightly sometimes but if over used, the results can look terrible. I tend to use the "low light" setting, but try experimenting.

Finally, four or so of the best TIFFs are exported into WinJupos for derotation and further detail sharpening.