why ppmcentre?

[Robert_T]

Now I've finally got my act together enough to make this program work, can anyone explain to me what precisely are the advantages of going through all the additional steps and fiddling with thousands of files instead of just a few? Is it just a size thing, that it cuts down the total size of files by cropping once the original avis are deleted or does it make for better quality processing and resulting images in Registax and if so why?

DOn't want to appear to be looking a gift horse in the mouth, I think it's fanatastic the work that Bird has put into this (how it centres and all that is amazing), just want to make sure I fully appreciate the benefit and that I'm using it to best effect.

cheers,

[iceman]

Benefits are thus:

1. Centering the planet in the middle of the frame.

Great for those with inaccurate tracking because registax seems to handle aligning much better when the tracking is accurate. It also makes registax faster.

2. Cropping

Cropping to 400x400 (or less sometimes) is good because it makes the whole processing in registax much faster.

3. Ranking

If you use the qestimator and renumber functions, it basically does a "gradient" analysis on the frame to rank them in best to worst order. It then renumbers your original bitmaps so that when you drag them into registax, frame 0000 is the best. So when you align in registax, you can choose the alignment feature on the best frame, which generally means registax should align and rank the frames much more accurately.

It adds a lot of time to the processing routine, but I feel the results are much better after the extra steps.

[Robert_T]

Thanks Mike - that's pretty much what I thought. The time isn't a problem so long as I can setup some automation like you do. I'm playing around with the quality estimator facility now. There's no doubt this is a powerful little program!

cheers,