My tutorial on Planetary Imaging and Image Processing

[iceman (Mike)]

Hi guys.

Over the past 6 months I've often been asked about my planetary imaging processing routine, so I finally sat down over the last few weeks and put my routine down on (internet) paper.

I've written a tutorial on Planetary Imaging and Image Processing.

It's mainly aimed at intermediate level planetary imagers who are looking to go to that next level, but I expect there'll be a lot that even beginners can get out of it. Advanced planetary imagers would already know most of the techniques and advice offered in the tutorial, but who knows, they may pick up something to try as well.

The image processing routines explained will work just as well for ToUcam/NexImage colour cameras, as well as those using mono cameras with RGB filters. The only real difference is that those using colour cameras will need to split their colour bitmaps into seperate channels using RGBSplit.

It's a long article, but it details factors that influence hi-res planetary imaging, and it details every step of my processing routine with screenshots, and examples at the end.

My processing routine makes use of two new applications:

PCFE (PpmCentre Front End) - PCFE is a VB application that takes as input one or more directories containing BMP files, allows you to set options for ppmcentre, and it will run Anthony Wesley's ppmcentre program on the command line. ppmcentre is a tool used to crop, centre and rank the BMP files. PCFE takes the trouble out of running DOS command line programs.

RGBSplit - RGBSplit is a VB application that will take as input one or more directories containing colour BMP files, and it will split the bitmaps into their Red, Green and Blue channels, saving the resulting bitmaps into their own subdirectories.

Both downloads are about 2meg. The applications were written by Hitchhiker (Adam Bialek). He's currently working on a combined application (called PIP) that does both PPMCentre and RGBSplit in the one run, on the one set of directories. It should be ready in about a week or so.

The article is here: Planetary Imaging and Image Processing

If you have any questions or feedback, i'm more than happy to hear them.

Thanks

[asimov (John)]

Nice tutorial Mike. This will surely help a lot of guys/gals that feel like they are 'imaging challenged'

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

About time Mike I'm just about ready to go back to DSO due to frustration

[Rigel003 (Graeme)]

Thanks, Mike, for such a detailed description and for being so generous in sharing. It's a great resource. I just amused myself for most of the afternoon trying to follow the tutorial, imperfectly no doubt, reprocessing one of my old AVIs from 13 June. First time I've processed the different colour channels separately from scratch and it took forever!

Interesting results. New version below on the left and old on the right. One surprising thing was the amount of brightening after the LR deconvolution - I had to reduce it a lot before I could properly judge the results.I can see several months (years?) of experimentation coming up.

Graeme

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

The new processing looks much better Graeme. Nice job.