The title is equivalent to saying "I'm afraid your right, Mike Salway". He recommended that I throw out less frames for a smoother result. Here's proof of that hypothesis in this processing experiment. Now choose the percentage you like best folks.
I guess the proof is in the pudding. Looks much better. I actually tried to process your pics too but ran into a codec problem that I couldn't fix easily. Mine won't look as good but I thought it would be fun to try anyway.
Regarding Dave's (the other one's) avi's, download the DivX package and then you'll be able to open the avi's.
I had the same problem.
Nice comparison reports, Dave (the other one). Definitely shows how more frames increases the signal to noise ratio. However you could also go further with the comparison, and show how if you keep adding more frames, eventually the image will get softer as you're stacking blurry/unsharp frames into the mix.
There's hopefully (depending on the seeing) a balancing point where you can get a sharp, smooth image and you need to pick the right number of frames for that.
What codec is appropriate for posting? I'm a Mac guy, so all my planetary movies are in an Astro IIDC proprietary codec. With .avi's I used divx which is pretty standard and gives a small file size. Less compressed .avi's may be so slow to download that people won't bother. I understand that most planetary guys use Registrax, which I'm told is fussy about codecs. The interesting question is whether Registrax can give noticeably better results than Astro IIDC on the Mac side.
Mike Right Fright -frame count study results
