Thank you all for your nice words of appreciation. It was at times, a tough project, but one that was rendered less painful by the good hardware and software tools I am fortunate to have at my disposal.
Each 5 minute sub frame was quite noisy, as I was working at F9.6 and I really could have done with 10 minute exposures, but Iris was already beginning to saturate and bloom at 5 mins, so I couldn’t go longer; nor was I certain that the mount could do so!
For the final stacked “still” frame, I combined the 30 sub-frames using the “Mean” mode, so that the real-time motion trail of Iris was revealed as a continuous line. This final stacked “still” frame has a much better signal to noise ratio (due to the stacking process), and hence can be developed further to reveal the subtle details. At this stage I thought, hmm, this might make a good animation.
So, I generated the animation using a new approach; here is the story:
- 30 sub frames of 5 minutes duration were Dark Frame and Flat Field reduced using MIRA AP with each reduced frame was saved as a FITs file.
- The 30 reduced frames were then “Median” combined in MIRA AP, which resulted in Iris being “deleted” in a final stacked “Median” image, as it did not appear in the same location in each frame.
- The (final) stacked and combined M104 Median image was then DDP processed in Images Plus and a small deconvolution performed in AIP4Win.
- This gave me a nice M104 and background with no Iris, plus 30 individual (5 minute frames) with Iris appearing at different locations along it’s path in each frame.
- Using CS3 I opened the M104 Median image, the combined one which has a much better signal to noise ratio due to stacking.
- Then, in CS3, I opened each individual 5 minute sub frame and added it as a Layer in the (stacked) final image, so the correct position of Iris in the 5 minute sub-frame was registered and Layered into the smoother Median combined image.
- After 30 such (manually tedious operations) I had 30 frames ready to animate.
- I saved these as JPGs and generated an AVI in K3CCDTools.
- I then punched this AVI through an application called “Advance GIF Animator” and voila, the final animated gif appeared!
As Steve has already noted, it looks too clean and clinical; gone are the hot/cold pixels that blink on and off; gone are the slight alignment jitters and gone is the poor signal to noise ratio of each 5 minute sub-frame.
Cheers
Dennis