Thanks Trevor, Anthony and Allan!
I almost downsized even further, contemplating removing the x2 Vixen Barlow and recording at the F12 prime focus (2160mm) on the Mewlon 180! I think the relatively small aperture of the ‘scope helped? I estimated the seeing to be approx 2-3/10 until around 10:30pm and then it recovered, in parts of some AVI’s, to maybe 4/10 and there was just enough there for Registax to do its magnificent work – what a killer application!
As the seeing was so variable, I decided there was nothing to be gained by recording at Gain=975, 60fps and 1/180 sec exposure, so I dropped the Gain to 700, 60fps and 1/60 sec. The tactic here was to get “denser” and “richer” data at a lower Gain of 700 and hopefully, be able to stack sufficient frames to get a reasonable output from Registax.
I had to manually sift through each AVI the next morning, to assess if there were sufficient quality frames to make it worth processing; a really tiresome task! From those selected AVI’s, I was able to harvest between 150 and 450 frames from 3000 recorded, to generate the final TIFs. The Quality setting was varied between 96-98% to reject the shockingly bad lava lamp frames. Each final stacked TIF had Wavelet6=100, W5=75 and W4=50 applied.
I then (a first for me) applied a Maximum Entropy Deconvolution in Astra Image Pro 3. The settings were 1.4 with 5 iterations and this added a much needed punch to most of the frames and for the 1st time, the project began to look like a real goer!
Finally, I used a script to import the 30 files into Layers in CS3 and did a “File save for web and devices” to produce the final gif. My head freaks out at what Bird is having to do with his huge data sets, with the x3 up sampling and 24 hour process time!!!
Cheers
Dennis
