From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: April 25, 2005 1:04:40 PM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Re: jupiter with moons/ 4-19-05

Hi Tim;

On 25-Apr-05, at 12:08 PM, Tim wrote:

but the seeing

was absolutely awful - and when I saw later on the news that the Jet

Stream was right over

Los Angeles, I saw why! We've got rain coming again later this week,

so it isn't likely that

the seeing will be good between now and next week. But I'll keep

trying.

I like to check

http://www.theweatherchannel.ca/weather/maps/floods.htm?sys

to see where the Jet Stream(s) and major systems are. Calgary has been having a week of good to very good stable clear skies (last night I got another 10 gigbytes of good jupiter movie), but that's supposed to end in a few days.

Are you saying that Astro IIDC doesn't give you a box for registering

like Registax does,

for instance? That could be a problem, but maybe offset somewhat by

the greater ability

to select stacked frames? I particularly like the option of setting

the minimum quality for

inclusion in the video up front.

This refers to two separate aspects of stacking and aligning in Astro IIDC for different versions.

Version 1.03.00 beta of Astro IIDC (only available to registered customers) can stack and align in real time (ie at approximately 30 fps on a G4 1.25 Gighz laptop) and produces a 16 bit single frame stack tiff file. You can use the Sharpness percentage estimator to eliminate "blurry" frames on the fly. You don't select an area to align with and it does it automagically.

Version 2.00.00 beta of Astro IIDC (currently available to a few select beta testers) can do the above (actually better now) and also can do it with recorded 8 or 16 bit movies (note there is no other stacking software on the Mac for 16 bit movies at all). It will calculate image sharpness for all the frames, then lets you set a % cut off based on the statistics of the sharpness, using a histograms and mean, median, mode and STD to decide which to include/exclude, and then auto aligns the frame using a user selected algorithm (planetary or Lunar/Solar). It also can batch stack movies so in most cases I set a few parameters up in a dilaog, pass it a list of up to 255 movies and off it goes. Also every image I've posted here (including the DSO star shots) has been aligned and stacked using Astro IIDC 2.0. Nebula and star shots are still problematic and not 100% reliable - but eventually I'll design a TIN or Chord star recognition system for that case.

Hope that helps..

Milton J. Aupperle

President

ASC - Aupperle Services and Contracting

Mac Software (Drivers, Components and Application) Specialist

#1005 - 815 14th Avenue. S.W.

Calgary Alberta Canada T2R0N5

1-(403)-229-9456

milton@outcastsoft.com