Mars 3rd November 150ED

[5ash (Philip)]

Another mars taken last night with the SW150ED using x2 Meade barlow and ASI290 MC camera . A stack of 2000 of 20000 frames processed in PIPP ( to adjust colour?) autostakker,registax and gimp2.
Philip

[Tulloch (Andrew)]

Nice image Philip, but there's really no need to use PIPP in your workflow, especially not for colour. Registax and Gimp are better for that purpose after all the stacking's been done.

Andrew

[Saturnine (Jeff)]

Hi 5ash
That is a fine image of Mars, good to see what the 150mm Skywatcher is capable of.
1st question is, when you image , are you in RGB or RAW format. The reason I use PIPP is to debayer the RAW video file and align all the frames before moving over to Registax for stacking and sharpening. Not aware that PIPP could be used for colour tweaking, that is much better done in Registax or Photoshop, Gimp etc.

[Tulloch (Andrew)]

From all I've read and done myself, AutoStakkert!3 does a better job of debayering than PIPP or Registax, and does a much better job of stacking than Registax.

And yes, you should be capturing in 8-bit raw format, not debayered colour. The throughput is 2/3 lower, so transfer rate can be higher, file sizes are smaller, and AS!3 uses a better debayer process than anything else.

Andrew

[5ash (Philip)]

Originally Posted by Tulloch

From all I've read and done myself, AutoStakkert!3 does a better job of debayering than PIPP or Registax, and does a much better job of stacking than Registax.

And yes, you should be capturing in 8-bit raw format, not debayered colour. The throughput is 2/3 lower, so transfer rate can be higher, file sizes are smaller, and AS!3 uses a better debayer process than anything else.

Andrew

Hi Andrew I’ve been capturing in raw8 but find that some captures look blue and grainy when you load them in autostakker. When loaded into pipp /options it appears blue and indicates debayering . When the options are tested one comes out with the correct colours.last night Jupiter and Saturn were fine but all the mars captures needed pipp.
Regards Philip

[Tulloch (Andrew)]

Sometimes AS!3 cannot automatically detect the bayer matrix used, especially if you captured in avi format. You can force the RGGB debayer matrix in AS!3, which should sort out the correct colours.

[5ash (Philip)]

Thanks for that Andrew , I’ll reprocess one and see how it works. The pipp step was time consuming and I only used it because it was suggested in a post somewhere to solve this problem.
Regards philip

[Tulloch (Andrew)]

The other option you should check is the Wred and Wblue settings for the ASI290MC. Others have noted that the values to use for this camera in FireCapture are Wred = 66, Wblue = 99.
https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/7...24/?p=10405666

The strange thing about FireCapture is that these settings have to be set individually for each planet setting - so even though you might have the best colour settings entered for Jupiter and Saturn, they may be different for Mars.

Just another thing to check .

Andrew