Here's a saturn image from data grabbed on the 9th of December. I've been a bit busy with work & other stuff, and also trying out newer (and slower) processing ideas.
It's not quite as good as the ealier one, but probably about as good as I could do with the less-than-good seeing.
Same scope and equipment as before, see the website for details.
Mike, due to limitations in registax I find myself adding more and more features to ppmcentre to compensate.
In this case I found that if I resampled my images 2x before aligning then registax has a lot of trouble getting a good quality estimate on each image, and after the align phase the images are still more-or-less in random order. The problem is that the raw images become too large for the algorithms that registax is using.
I worked around this by adding the quality estimator function to ppmcentre and having it re-number the output images according to their quality, best image becomes 00001, next best image is 00002 etc down to worst images at the end. This means I can choose the first 1/2 or 1/3 of the processed frames and drag them into registax and not have to worry about how good/bad the quality estimator in registax happens to be. I just process all of the images I drag in.
up to the usual High Bird standard that we've come to expect and can only hope to emulate
Actually Anthony, do you have a Toucam as well? Not sure if it'd be worth the effort for yourself, but I'd certainly be very interested to see a series of images from you with Toucam and Dragonfly taken under same night conditions and then separate images for each, one processed simply with the defaults etc through registax etc (I guess your average Joe's processing) and then one with the more elaborate processing techniques you've been developing. I'm keen to understand how much improvement is being added by camera and how much by processing (with the underlying quality of your scope setup as a relative constant) - what think you?
up to the usual High Bird standard that we've come to expect and can only hope to emulate
Actually Anthony, do you have a Toucam as well? Not sure if it'd be worth the effort for yourself, but I'd certainly be very interested to see a series of images from you with Toucam and Dragonfly taken under same night conditions and then separate images for each, one processed simply with the defaults etc through registax etc (I guess your average Joe's processing) and then one with the more elaborate processing techniques you've been developing. I'm keen to understand how much improvement is being added by camera and how much by processing (with the underlying quality of your scope setup as a relative constant) - what think you?
cheers,
I used to have a ToUCam, but I donated it to my old highschool, there were a few keen students there that wanted to use the schools scope (a C8) for imaging. I hadn't used the ToUcam for a year or more so I thought it was better that it sent somewhere that it would be appreciated :-)
we can put it all to the test in march hopefully, we can throw my toucam in your scope etc.
On average seeing nights, registax will grade by quality not shape and thus it is a waste of time!!!!. I tried all the options last night from gradient to human to contrast. All done on a 1400 frame run from a 4/10 seeing night. Nothing brought the "round" mars to the front. My stacked image looked like an egg! Surface features were fine, but egg shape sux!!!
I do not want to hand pick my way thru 1400 frames.
Therefore I am gettting highly frustrated with registax and i would love to get hold of your latest ppmcentre to play with when it is ready for general "beta testing".
Lovely image Anthony, looks like the season is now on in ernest. Have finally got my neighbours tree lopped so that I can see the meridian and therefore transits. Look forward to more of your shots.
Glorious Anthony. I think it's safe to assume a CCD webcam will not give these kind of results that you can get with your camera...At least that's how I'm viewing the overall 'big picture'.
Really great shots, can't wait to see more like that. Really shows how important the post-processing is to the final result... if you can get that from less than good seeing!
cant wait to see one from good seeing 
