From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: March 8, 2009 2:23:03 PM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Requested feature for next version


Hi Dave and Gail;


On 8-Mar-09, at 10:40 AM, doodlebun wrote:


All is well here on the day of the opposition of Saturn with good seeing and clear skies predicted. What I am planning on doing is to record a high quality luminance movie of Saturn at f/25 every minute until the cows come home.


There is a copy and paste Apple Script that will do this automagically shown on page 82 in the Astro IIDC manual.


And you can have Astro IIDC "Guide" while it's doing the captures too if your tracking isn't perfect. Set the Guide sheet tolerance to say 10 pixels so it only makes corrections sporadically and it can keep saturn centered for hours while that script runs.


The idea is to finally make the effort to combine the final processed tiff images into a monochrome movie. To do this I will need to bring the final Astro IIDC processed tiffs into Photoshop and carefully register each frame and then export one by one the final frame into a folder for later inport into Quicktime or back into Astro IIDC.  I have noticed that version 4.02.00 allows the user to select the best frames and export a movie with the deleted frames removed. But the planet jumps all over the place because no registration or alignment has occurred.  If an additional alignment step was performed before movie construction then the exported movie would be perfect, showing the rotation desired.


If I had  50 captured movies to start, then I could create 50 processed and optimized tiffs. Those tiffs could be made into a movie using the IMAGES TO RGB48 MOVIE function. The movie produced has no registration of images unfortunately.


Is there a workaround for this, am I overlooking something, or is this a feature under consideration for the next upgrade?


That feature is not supported in Astro IIDC currently. It was something I was considering adding, but I ran out of time to include it in 4.01.00 or 4.02.00.


Basically you would select a bunch of sequential images (i.e. tiff, probably stacks generated by Astro IIDC)  files that Astro IIDC would import. In batch mode, it would perform a centroid alignment on each frame,  then align them all and dump them out into a ARGB32 movie. In manual mode, it could still do the centroid align, but then you could step through each frame and fine tune the alignment. The manual mode is intended to handle things like Lunar Eclipses where the shape and brightness the object will change over time and is not easily or reliably handled in an automated methodology.


HTH..


PS:


I shot Saturn 2 nights ago at 5,000 mm focal length with the C8 an hour after I finished with the moon. The seeing had dropped off considerably and a cloud front was moving in, so it's not good at all. I shot luma in 1x1 monochrome 16 bit using 66 ms exposures and gains in the low 10 to 30% range. The R G B filtered movies would be so dark that I shot them in binned 2x2 mode, which allowed me to shoot at at 66 ms exposures with gains at 15%. As near as I can tell, there was very little degradation in color fidelity at all.



Milton Aupperle