From: "Eric" <eddot1103a@mindspring.com>

Date: July 20, 2006 2:08:25 PM MDT

To: <Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com>

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Jupiter image

Hi Alan,

Yes, I started hand selecting myself with some of the lunar movies.  It does take time, but I can start to see improvement already.  Not sure how long it's going to take, but it seems that seeing was too rippled to let auto stacking do the job.  I think we have similar weather patterns since we're in ballpark areas (Salem, NJ here). 

There was something I noticed with IIDC about aligning and stacking.  For some reason, frames that had moved across the screen (due to inaccurate polar alignment) were not aligned.  This amounted to about half of the hand picked frames.  If I prealigned first in KIS, then all would be included in the IIDC alignment, but not the case if I started with IIDC. 

The pyramid sharpening in KIS seems to work about the same as Registax wavelets from what I've found.  Both are very handy and useful features. 

BTW, I do have the final Jupiter posted now using the "real" RGBs from the same group of movies:

http://www.mindspring.com/%7Eastro4565/jupiter20060717_203905.jpg

Eric

----- Original Message -----

From: Alan Friedman

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Thursday, July 20, 2006 1:52 PM

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