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Also, remember that we're aligning and stacking somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand frames, and that every frame is slightly different due to atmospheric effects and tracking - ie the image falls onto a slightly different place across the ccd grid in each frame, and the actual resolved details change from one frame to the next, images are distorted or larger/smaller from one frame to the next, and this impacts on the theoretical size of the airy disk in each frame.
This is advantageous for us, as it means that we can see more detail than otherwise would be possible if all the frames were identical. To take best advantage of this dynamic environment requires some amount of oversampling on the raw data and then careful selection and processing of some subset of the raw frames later on.
I've felt for a while that the current crop of software packages used for post-processing are not getting the most out of the raw data, as they all use very simple algorithms. My gut feeling is that there is probably another 50% or more of resolving power possible just from improvements in image processing.
regards, Bird
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