The seeing on coastal Sydney was far better last night than the night before. Here's a rough tri-colour video image featuring Syrtis Major. More time needed to get through the rest of the AVI's and process
Nice one Steve, we were both out at the same time! I've got data of the same face, and you're right, the seeing was MUCH better because of a break in the jetstream.
I just need to find some time to process my data, but i'm looking forward to it and hope my results are even close to yours.
You're right about the seeing Mike and you managed a great image with the dob!
I Worked on another AVI tonight..a little more detail here. Put the last two side by side.
More to come...
Wow Steve, even better than the last. Very crisp focus, and the colour is excellent. That's how I want mine to look, as the image scale is almost the same.
How many frames of each colour did you stack?
Can you talk us through some of your processing steps and techniques?
Thanks chaps. Yeah Ice, as I mentioned a while back, I'm not a believer in stacking thousands of images (well in my set-up at least anyway) for a few reasons but essentially because subtle undulations in the atmosphere still distort/warp the shapes of features even though the frame may look sharp. So I still tend to deal with my pic's the old fasioned way and visually scrutinize each frame until I end up with between 30 to 100 of what my eyes tell me are the best images. I do this with Virtual Dub. This is usually enough frames to cancel out random noise through stacking thus allowing resonable application of a deconvolution filter without over adding too much noise back into the image. Thank god for Registax though..in years past I used to hand stack sets of 5 images using PhotoShop. It would take a whole Saturday to produce one image - I could never go back to that time consuming practice now and my wife COMPLETELY agrees but (for me at least) it taught me about what works and what doesn't.
Anyhow..here a little Mars rotation action from the opther night - I'll refine it to much smoother progression as I get around to the remaining AVI's
Nice animation Steve, looking forward to the end result!
It's sometimes frustrating how you can spend just an hour capturing 10 avi's in good seeing, and spend the next week processing them!
As for your processing, have you thought of using registax to sort the frames in what it thinks is the sharpest, and then save that avi set using the registax function and bring that avi into virtual dub to hand select the best frames. At least registax might get it fairly close, and you can automatically delete the obviously soft frames that it has sorted towards the end. It might make the hand selection process a bit quicker.
Ice, I've tried several tests in this way but still find that the human eye makes the best judgement - I need to experiment more with V3. I have to be honest..I prefer V2 mainly for simplicity sake. BTW..if you still have problems with Registax alignment feature not handling images that jump all over the screen then I have a Windows based program I wrote for this very reason. You simply view each sequential BMP (previously saved as the sharpest) and click your mouse on the centre of the planet (no matter where it is on the screen) and it will automatically centre, crop and save the files. Then when importing into registax he alignment and stacking process is far quicker. Let me know if you'd like to try it any time..its FREE!!!
Nup...if one of you would like to try it out then just say the word and I'll put a zipped file on my website. The main thing will be to see how well the setup program works on installation. So you can be my test body with complaints etc on that. If there are problems I can fix them and upload a new version.
Sounds good Steve.. bird (anthony wesley) wrote a similar program called "ppmcentre" which sounds like it does what you say, but it does it automatically.
absolutely stunning !
but (for me at least) it taught me about what works and what doesn't.
