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Robert
Well done mate. I agree, Virtual Dub is a great visual tool for discriminating (visually) the best images. In my opinion (and only mine) I think the pic at uppermost of this thread at right is best. Sorry Asimov..but in my opinion the natural look is lost in the reprocessed version. It is so important to maintain a natural reproduction despite the temptation to contrast the hell out of our images. I've certainly been guilty of doing this in the past but cringe when i view some of those results now.
Not wanting to blab on too much, but when i was on a 24" inch scope both recently and in 2001, I took the time to sit back with an eyepiece in place (rather than a CCD eye for a change) and tried to take in the view of this world from the perspective of early observers like Schiaparelli and Lowell - just for the heck of it. From this incredible perspective, one realises just how subtle the low albedo features are compared to brighter peach coloured desert regions and just how subtle the borders between dark and brighter are. Particularly during my 2001 run, I tried to reproduce the images to replicate (as close as possible) the colours my eye percieved versus the hues in which a camera (in some cases) more accurately replicates.
Bottom line: if the raw images aren't so great to start with, don't push em too hard in order to get more detail. Select and stack less frames of better seeing and enhance them lightly to create a more accurate representation of the view rather than introducing artefacts that spoil the picture and have no place in reality.
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