Reprocessed Saturn from the 11th Jan

[iceman]

Hi guys.

What else to do when there's 6 days straight of clouds? Reprocess.

After speaking with Bird about the artifacts I was getting around the edges of Saturn where it meets with the rings, he suggested it could be one of three things:

1. Not enough light being captured
2. Registax alignment not locking onto the features correctly
3. Too aggressive in the processing

For #1, i'll try capturing a brighter image next time.
For #2, I changed my alignment box area (used size 128) and aligned it on the globe with a bit of the rings. Previously I aligned it on the edge of the rings to pick up the sharpest CD.
For #3, I've now reprocessed the same avi in the following way:

- Registax, to the wavelets tab, RGB align (no wavelets)
- PixInSight LE, wavelet processing and noise reduction
- Registax, histogram and gamma adjust
- Photoshop, colour balance and levels

I've gone much softer on the wavelet processing to try and maintain the "globe" shape, and a sure sign of overprocessing is when the Cassini Division gets wider and wider. So this time, i've gone soft to keep a smaller tigher cassini division.

So on the left is the new image, on teh right is my previous effort.

It's a tough call - I like the CD and shape of the globe better in the new image, but I like the banding right up to the SPC in the old image. The crepe ring is probably a bit more natural looking in the new image too.

So somehow I need to take the best out of both images :) There's a bit of "fuzziness" to the new image as well which I'm not too fond of.

Anyway, for your consumption and feedback.. here they are.

More experimenting to do.. :shrug:

[bird]

Hey Mike - how large is your raw data? I've been swamped by work and poor weather the last few weeks, but it might be fun to play with someone else's data :-)

regards, Bird

[iceman]

I sent you the stacked TIFF, but i'm happy to send you the bmp's. I'd love to see what you can get out of my data.

I'll upload it.

[iceman]

oh darn, the zipped set of bmp's is 180meg. It'll take some time to upload.

[bird]

That's ok - can you put it on the website and email me the URL? An archive with the compressed BMP's would be the best way to go.

I've had a play in Astra Image with the image you sent me - sometimes I can spend hours trying different settings and processing options, but so far I've tried:

- split colour planes
- unsharp mask, max strength, power 2.0 on each plane
- deconvolve, ME 5 x 1.5
- recombine
- unsharp mask, same as before, on the colour image.

The result isn't too bad... it would be interesting to start with your raw BMP's.

regards, Bird

[iceman]

Thanks Anthony.

Here's the URL: everyone is welcome to have a play. But it's 180meg so it's not dialup friendly :)

Zip of BMPs (http://www.iceinspace.com.au/downloads/sat6bmp.zip) (180meg)

It's 1100 frames, already sorted and cropped in ppmcentre. I've also already deleted the worst 400 frames from the original 1500 frames.

[bird]

Thanks, downloading it now... estimated 1hr20mins :-)

Bird

[davidpretorius]

me too, 47mins to go, i am sure i am slowing you down as well bird.

good to hear from you bird, hopefully you can get back out soon, i am missing those jaw droppers!!!

[bird]

Hi DP - we're sort of in-between planets at the moment, and I'm busy with work stuff as well so I've been a bit quiet lately.

I was hoping to have my 13" mirror by now, but it's still not ready, so that's taken a bit of the excitement out of things - when I finally get it then it'll be full throttle again.

Bird

[bird]

Okay, here's the version processed from your raw data. What do you think?

regards, Bird

[davidpretorius]

very nice.

[iceman]

Nice Anthony! Way better than my attempt.

Now spill! :P

[bird]

Gotta go out for a bit... details later :-)

Bird

[davidpretorius]

wot a tease, ice, time to revoke his membership of IIS!!!

send out the hounds and track him down!!! Leave no stone unturned!

[rumples riot]

Still a nice shot regardless Mike. I do like Birds rendition though. Not as heavy on the processing. I would say it is the sequence and some of the settings. Wish Adelaide was not in a seeing hole. Even my great seeing down the south coast did not produce results as sharp as yours. Might move to Barbados. Seeing is good there I hear.

[bird]

Okay, here's what I did...

step 1 - break each colour frame into 3 monochrome frames (red,green,blue).
step 2: process all the red frames through registax and astra image, make a final red master
steps 3 and 4, same as (2) for the other colours
step 5: recombine the red,green and blue frames in astra image.

Doing each colour seperately allows registax to get a better lock on the details, it's evident that the colours all all slightly out of alignment in the raw frames, this is normal for an object that's low in the sky.

Processing the frames in colour mode makes life tough for registax, as the images all look a little blurry, so I don't do that.

The other processing step in Astra Image was to use the "maximum" filter, it has the effect of narrowing the cassini division back to where it's supposed to be, and Maximum Entropy deconvolution.

I used the commandline netpbm tools to automate the splitting of colour planes, via a short shellscript on my Linux machine (sorta like a batch file if you're using Windows).

regards, Bird

[ving]

gr8 stuff mike... to me there is only a little difference in the post processing pic of yours and anthonys. keep it up :)

[davidpretorius]

so this program breaks each bmp of mikes into separate red, green & blue. is there a windows version???

[asimov]

Barbados? Ok, I'll see you there Rumples.

Very nice images Mike & Bird!

[iceman]

Bird, thanks for the info.

I've got netpbm already (from when I planned to do pre-processing a few months ago) - what command line parameters did you use? Better yet, can you email me the shell script? I'm sure I can script it in DOS batch, even though it's been a while since I've played with DOS. Failing that, i'll use one of the unix servers at work :) It might process it a lot faster than my laptop, too :)

After creating each master in registax, did you use wavelets, or just save the stacked image?

What parameters did you use for "maximum" and "ME deconvolution"?

Sorry for the questions - next step is using your processing steps to produce the same image myself.. then i'll know how to repeat it for the next images.

I'm sure this procedure is going to add an extra hour to each avi file.. thanks heaps Anthony! :bashcomp: :)

[davidpretorius]

hey asi, i have downloaded the ziipped up files, do you want me to post to you on cd???

[asimov]

Yes, ok mate, thanks!

[bird]

The script is quite short, here it is:
------------------start---------------------
#!/bin/sh

mkdir red green blue

for i in *.bmp; do
echo $i
base=`basename $i .bmp`
new=$base.ppm
red=$base.red
green=$base.grn
blue=$base.blu

# Convert a.bmp to a.ppm
bmptoppm < $i > $new

# create a.red, a.grn and a.blu
ppmtorgb3 $new

# convert each one back to BMP and write to subdirectory
ppmtobmp -bpp 8 < $red > red/${base}.bmp
ppmtobmp -bpp 8 < $green > green/${base}.bmp
ppmtobmp -bpp 8 < $blue > blue/${base}.bmp

# clean up, remove intermediate files
rm -f $red $green $blue $new
done
-------------------end---------------------

It creates 3 subdirs (red,green,blue). For every file XXX.bmp it creates red/XXX.bmp blue/XXX.bmp and green/XXX.bmp as monochrome files.

What else... yes I used wavelets in registax, but fairly gentle, so that the images weren't overly processed. I think I stacked about 500 frames each time and set the wavelets to about 10 in the middle layers, left the lower and upper layers alone.

The maximum filter doesn't take any parameters... I assume that it uses a 3x3 or 5x5 filter size, and sets the centre to the largest value.

for ME I used 10 turns at 1.5. I also experimented with LR deconvolution, that might actually be what I used in the last image - 10 turns at 1.5 again.

DP: Yes, you can get the package for Windows. I think that's what Mike has done.

regards, Bird

[Robert_T]

Lovely reprocess Mike and Bird, each are excellent images in their own way. :)


If I'm reading this right, PPM centre that you run creates BMP frames that Bird has split into red, green and bluw and processed separately?

[iceman]

Thanks Robert.

And no, not exactly.

I start with an avi, and I use "VirtualDub" to save the image sequence as a set of bmp's. Each frame in the avi comes out as a BMP file. So you end with a thousand or a few thousand bmp files.

ppmcentre then works from bmp files, processing each frame separately.

[atalas]

Great work guy's !