[davidpretorius]

Hi,

i managed to finish off the 6:06 am raw mode 90 sec 450 frame video.

1. Split into r/g/b avis via aviraw,
2. virtualdub into bmps
3. ppmcentre to centre the images and to crop to 400x400, but no quality estimate necessary due to great seeing
4. registax with each colour
   1. turn auto processing off
   2. align, and then using framelist, click on the newly positioned #1 frame and align again.
   3. limited each to around a quality of 88%.
   4. create a reference frame of aprox 10% of the # of frames left after limiting
   5. move slider3 to 5.8 and then press continue. (this 2 lots of alignment, create reference and slight wavelets creates an reference image that should be slightly better than your best individual frame. the program then goes through each frame and will try and alter it to match this "ideal" image.
   6. optimise (not optimise and stack) with resample set to mitchell if wanting to upsize it a bit
   7. goto stack tab
   8. click stach graph and move line down to limit any frames that could not be optimised well
   9. stack with histostretch not checked
   10. goto wavelets and move slider 6 to the right, then 5, then 4, then 3 ro your liking. I have three saved setting soft medium and hard
   11. save as a tiff file
5. in astral image
   1. open up each of the 3 tiffs r/g/b
   2. convert each to greyscale and then rename each to r,g,b
   3. do a quick rgb combine and align the colours if necessary, zoom in for fine control to use as a reference and rename to combine1
   4. i have used a LR deconvolution of 3 x 1.3 on each of the three frames. As my image scale is around 1000x, the little preview window is misleading to how each frame will turn out, so trial and error here, sometime ini ME, i have used 10x2. There is no set rules here. Jupiter has been a ME planet for ages for me, but with these images only a light 3x1.3 LR deconvolution sharpened up some of the cloud formations
   5. combine and align if necessary (settings from before should still be there)
   6. unsharp mask: i have showed all three with a value of 2.0
   7. median 3x3 then softens slightly the unsharp mask.
   8. if using evaluation version of astral image, then do a screen dump (shift-Prnt Scrn)
6. into photoshop for pasting the screen dump and arrange image(s) as necessary

My temperatures of my mirror and ambient were within .2 degrees of each other. There was a hole in the jetstream over the state and i used the moons of jupiter to focus. I did star tests at around 500x (12.5mm in the 5x powermate) for around 1/2 hr at 11.30pm before i went to bed. I did a quick check star test before i started imaging at 5:15am.

Conclusions: When working with raw mode, it is preferable to leave the histo stretch option unchecked whilst stacking. Astral image will do a histo stretch automatically, but it seems it is less severe and the slight burn out hass all but disappeared.

Feel free to play with any of these images and i have a 80mbyte zipped up file with the 450 each of r/g/b bmps, many tiffs from different resamples and histo-stretch on/off. I can burn to cd and send to you, or if 80 mbytes is ok for you to download, i will put on my webserver later today

I am sure i have forgotten something, but will add it as we go along.