I just can't believe the seeing at the moment. I don't remember a time where the jetstream has hung overhead so consistently and the seeing has been so consistently bad.
My last night of good seeing was the 30th March
Anyway, out again last night at about 10pm to push my luck. The seeing was average to start with, I took 2 avi's before the seeing turned to mush so I gave up in disgust. 10 minutes out there, and back inside again
Here's the results of the effort, avi#1 was the only usable avi. Haven't seen Red Jr in a while, so at least I captured him. Amazing how close they're getting now.
Usual processing routine -
- Virtual dub to save avi as bmp's
- ppmcentre to crop and rank
- split into rgb
- align and stack separate rgb channels in registax. Create reference frame with wavelets 3@10, 4@15.
- Stack 100 frames of each channel, Wavelets applied 3@12ish, 4@25ish, 5@35ish, 6@48ish, save as tiff
- Stack 200 frames of each channel, Wavelets applied 3@12ish, 4@25ish, 5@35ish, 6@48ish, save as tiff
- Open the 100 r/g/b channel images in AstraImage, Convert to greyscale, ME deconvolution 3/1.3, Recombine (with R/B shift), Gamma adjust 0.7, Save as TIFF
- Open the 200 r/g/b channel images in AstraImage, Convert to greyscale, ME deconvolution 3/1.3, Recombine (with R/B shift), Gamma adjust 0.7, Save as TIFF
- Slight curves and unsharp mask of each image in photoshop, save for web.
So, the left image is the result of the 100 frame stack. The right image is the result of the 200 frame stack.
My conclusion? I'm still convinced that my "standard" of stacking the 100 best frames is producing a better result than stacking more frames, where you'll end up stacking bad quality frames with the good ones.
In my opinion, the image on the left is sharper. Obviously I have to be careful not to process too hard, else it ends up quite grainy due to only 100 frames being stacked. If the seeing is better than good, I'd expect you'd have MORE of the best quality frames to stack, so in that case maybe stacking 200 would work equally as well, and produce a smooth result too.
But in bad seeing (which is all I get these days), this seems to produce the best result in the conditions.
Comments welcome.