From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: August 12, 2009 12:22:57 PM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Re: Jupiter animation


Hi Malte;


Nice sequence.


Actually the problem with "Images to aligned movie" is it will not handle large changes in brightness and is not designed to either. For example,  the disk of Jupiter in the gif changes by 22% from image 6 and image 7 , which throws the fine alignment algorithm completely off. That is explained on page 49 of the Astro IIDC manual.


I was working on a manual "onion skin" mode which would do a coarse centroid alignment and then allow you to nudge align the images together, but ran out of time on it. Likely it will get rolled into a later update or maybe the 5.0 upgrade.


HTH..


Milton Aupperle





On 12-Aug-09, at 12:10 PM, maltetewes wrote:


Hi all,


here comes my Jupiter animation ... it's more or less a first time for me as well.

Modest setup : good old Meade LX6 8'' SCT, Unibrain Fire-i color webcam directly in the focal plane, i.e. at  f/10)


Natural pixel size, with legend :

https://documents.epfl.ch/users/m/mt/mtewes/www/small_withlabels.gif

2x upsampled :

https://documents.epfl.ch/users/m/mt/mtewes/www/large.gif


The colors look a bit special, I tweaked the gains a lot while recording and had to "compensate" for these tweaks before assembling the animation. Ahem...

I suppose I'm slowly getting near to the limit of this low-level 3x7 bit bayer mask camera.


By the way making the anigif was a bit non-straightforward; I've used the Gimp, aligning all my 9 layers manually, then converting to indexed colours (ouch) and exporting as gif...

Do you have better solutions ? Astro IIDC's "Images to aligned movie" had some trouble with the moving satellites or the overprocessed Jupiter, and the alignement was not that fine.


Next time I will also have a closer look at the collimation first.


Cheers,

Malte