Is Venus Boring?

 

Friends, it's not boring if you're cool.  (And Venus is not cool at an average temp of 462 deg C.)

Stacked 1,409 frames out of 28,188.  QHY 290 mono with IR685 (I think) through the C11 with TV 2x barlow.

Data collected here at 4:04 am on 7/29.

There is a slightly noticeable feature right above the center -- there is a hint of a dark square-ish area.  In some of the original video frames it seems to be barely present.  So there...

Oh, the more important point about all this...

So the reason why I haven't posted any Venus images is that I was getting artifacts in Registax.  The artifacts looked like the outlines of the square alignment points.   No matter how I re-arranged them, I would always see some remnant of the alignment points when I started sharpening.   At first, I thought it was some defect in Registax, but I also saw them when I brought the images into Gimp.

Then I decided to try a lot fewer alignment points and that was the solution.   But upon further research into alignment points, I stumbled upon this thread on Cloudynights:

https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/562976-autostakkert-alignment-points-question/?p=7644528

Now, I'm wondering if I've been doing this wrong all this time.   Do fewer alignment points produce better stacked planet images? 

(Later...)

Artifacts are back (no matter if I do less or more alignment points) and I'm getting weird "ringworm "on the planet.   They look like either dust motes OR reflections from the optical system.  I was using a cheap violet filter here and yeah...   It's possible that the "detail" on the lowest part of the planet is real cloud structure.

I've got a bunch of this footage and I think the verdict is NO on my crappy violet filter.

It looks like I've got to pick up a proper UV pass-through filter if I want cloudy details on Venus.

Just including the last mono stack that I took with the QHY 290 with Violet filter.

This is the best 5% of approx. 48,000 frames.  Data massaged in Autostakkert, Registax, Gimp, and even Topaz sharpen (then back to Gimp).  

Video was captured at 4:48 am on 7/31. 

There are some differently contrasted areas to the top and bottom, but they seem too symmetrical to be real.    In the planet disc itself, there are hints of different densities but nothing that stands out.  I did have to play around with alignment points AGAIN to get it to stack properly and so I'm including another screen shot.   This time I didn't really put down alignment points near the edge of the planet.

I was reading that barlow optics may have a deleterious effect on UV light transmission.   So, some people are advising against a barlow.   That really means you need a C14 and camera with 2.4 micron pixels. What you need is completely reflective optics like a traditional newt OR a quartz-based lens.  Link.

Considering the title, I couldn't help but include this link.