From: Alan Friedman <alan@greatarrow.com>

Date: July 20, 2006 11:52:48 AM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Jupiter image

Hi Eric - 

On Jul 20, 2006, at 1:32 PM, Eric wrote:

Although seeing was good here over the three days, it was still rough in the way that images distort (like rippled water).  For the moon, hand picking the frames seems to be working the best but is going to take large amounts of time :(.  When you created your Plato/ Alpine mosaic, did you hand pick the frames for your stacks?  I have a similar mosaic, although of a different area, that I'm working on.  

I remember that I hand selected the frames from the streams that contained Plato and the Alpine Valley. I used a very large number of separately aligned stacks here trying to draw the most detail from the video. The other (twenty or so) streams were done using Astro IIDC with 6-9 manual alignment regions per stack. 

In my experience and with my local seeing, the most juice can be squeezed from lunar video when you hand select on a certain section of the frame. This is relatively simple if there is one prominent crater or rille in the field. But if there are several features of interest you will find sharpness varies across the field of even the best frames. Manual alignment helps - but choosing frames that are sharpest in a particular region will give the best result. Of course this can take a crazy amount of work - it might be better to just get a better site as those guys featured on today's LPOD did!

Alan