Registax v4

[rapidfire]

Hi All,

I'm just dipping my toes into astro imaging. pretty neat. I was wondering if there was an online help/howto/pdf/anything for registax v4 for all the options and thingies. Being even a novice to photography as well as astrophotography i am kinda in the deep end.

Cheers. marc.

[iceman]

Hi Marc.

You could try starting with the 2 articles I've written, which both have registax hints and tips, and generally stuff about planetary imaging.

Astrophotography with a Dob (http://www.iceinspace.com.au/index.php?id=63,201,0,0,1,0)

Planetary Imaging and Image Processing (http://www.iceinspace.com.au/index.php?id=63,306,0,0,1,0)

Hope they help. Keep asking questions.

[rapidfire]

Thanks Mike. This will keep me busy. I am using a canon powrshotA75 afocally thru my ETX125 using a bracket I made up. A test shot today showed me I need to make some mods to the bracket hehe.

Heres a shot I took today of the moon. Its taken with a 32 meade super plossl. No filter. And my mount isnt motorised either. The colour distorted a bit but i think thats because my bracket didnt align quite right hehe.

I love my ETX.

[rmcpb]

Marc,

Yep, the colour difference is from the camera not being square to the lense. Not only does that give colour changes but it changes the shpae of the object being photographed. Not a problem within the same set of photos as far as stacking is concerned but if the camera is moved then the images cannot be stacked together as the shapes will be constantly different between the sets.

I find afocal shots of the moon to be brilliant, so simple and they do not distract you from really exploring the moon visually.

Keep it up :)

[rapidfire]

More questions....when running the align step in registax, what is the frame quality measure? and how does this relate to the Low Quality percentage value? what do these mean? I get a low quality of say 90.8%....is this sayin9 90% of the frames are bad? or that 90% of that alignment point was low quality?

Thanks for all the help. Marc.

[rapidfire]

oh and after running the previous image thru Image Shop Pro i ended up with this. My first moon capture. I'm pretty happy with it.

I am looking forward to many more moon pictures over the coming cycles. It gives me something to play with when the nights are cloudy. I'll need to grab myself a quality barlow in order to go chasing planetary images.

[sheeny]

Well done Marc! That's great for a first attempt!

Al.

[sheeny]

I'm going to take a stab here, Marc. I may be wrong, in which case I hope someone more knowledgeable on the forum will correct me.

From my observations of registax, it uses some algorithm to determine the relative image quality (I don't know how it does that), but the percentage quality figure is a measure of how much of the frame/image matches the "best frame". At least that's how I think it works:shrug:. So when you get a low quality of 90.8%, it means that your worst image matched the best over 90.8% of the image.

I guess you are stacking relatively few individual images:shrug: or are you stacking frames from avis? When you start processing avis (say 600 frames or more) then a lot of the features in Registax will appear differently in character. For example, you may have your quality limit set at 90% which might result in a limit of say 400 frames out of 600 perhaps. So only the best quality frames are used. And of course you can control how many frames you choose from the avi.

I hope this helps,

Al.

[rmcpb]

What did you do to the image in Image Shop Pro to get rid of the coloured background?

[jjjnettie]

Wow, that cleaned up the image.
Do you have a set of Moon Maps or a copy of Virtual Moon?
I found that once I started taking my own pictures of the Moon that I wanted to know what every crater and feature was called.
You can take movies with your camera? Try zooming it in on Jupiter and capture a few avi's to practice with in Registax.

[rapidfire]

wow thanks for all the feedback everyone. learning a lot from these forums. I greyscaled the image to remove the colour, then fiddled the black and white levels to produce the final image. I use Paint Shop Pro rather than photoshop.
I do have a moon map and suspect a long and glorious winter imaging the moon and learning all her features. I have to say I love the lunar seas the most. I think jupiter will also be soon on the hitlist.

heres a picture of my setup. the camera adapter i made is clearly visible. except i have the camera off it...to take this pic :P i'm pretty happy so far with this setup. I want to buy a better finder scope soon and a barlow or 2. I was thinking of the meade #140 barlow but apparently its length bottoms out in ETX scopes.