In the absence of any decent seeing for Uranus imaging this year, I decided to have a look again at my January 13th Uranus IR data from last year, to see if I could improve the visibility of the planet’s Epsilon ring.

With the valued help of planetary imager Tom Williams and with the use of AstroSurface rather than Registax wavelets, I was able to improve the contrast of the faint rings with the background. I also was better able to sort through the 35 videos, each of 4mins duration, and just pick the very best data to combine in Winjupos derotate.

Almost all of these best videos were at the end of the session when the planet’s altitude was lower, but the humidity had risen and mist increased, just before cloud moved in - which led to better seeing. By just selecting the data from these best five videos, the contrast of the rings to the background in the final image was much improved over last year’s processing attempt.

The final image shows my image compared with a SETI Uranus Viewer 3.1 image for the same derotated time. Instrument and imaging set-up details are given at the bottom of the image. Frame exposure time was 125msec, gain was 400 and I used a 16bit bit-depth. The planet itself was processed differently from that used for the ring and moons but has been added in the correct relative location. It obviously replaces the burnt out image of the planet that resulted from the processing required to bring out the ring & moons.

Amazingly the result from the very best 4min video of the whole set, actually shows the rings quite clearly. Most of the rest of the remaining 31 videos show very little presence of the rings.

Martin