From: "Steve Bryson" <stevebeam@yahoo.com>

Date: November 26, 2005 12:14:09 AM MST

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: What a difference a little work makes

Hi - Following Alan's example, I've reworked my image of Hadley Rille.  I used astrostack 

to derotate and save over 5000 frames, hand picked the best ones (ended up with 233), 

and used Keith's Image Stacker to produce 11 different stacks, each aligned on a different 

feature and identically pyramid sharpened.  All assembled and further enhanced in 

Photoshop.  The improvement is considerabe:  The before image (based on the best 40 of 

900 images) is at 

http://homepage.mac.com/stevepur/astrophotography/images/firei/hadley_apollo_15.jpg

while the after image is 

http://homepage.mac.com/stevepur/astrophotography/images/firei/

hadley_composite.jpg

Stacking so many frames allowed me to be very agressive with the pyramid sharpening.  

No explicit noise reduction was needed.  Some camera artefacts are visible in the lower 

half of the image.  I do have a voice in my head suggesting I oversharpened in the last 

photoshop step.  Anyone out there feel that way?

This wasn't as hard as it sounds, only about two hours of actual work.  The aligning and 

derotating in astrostack took a very long time but I did not be there while it did it.   

I got my DMK camera today, but it's too windy tonight.  Maybe I'll try it out on Mars 

tomorrow.  Can't wait to see what I can do with the moon with it!

Happy Thanksgiving weekend!

Steve

http://homepage.mac.com/stevepur/astrophotography