From: Howard Fink <howard.fink@nyu.edu>

Date: November 10, 2009 10:31:11 AM MST

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] November 9, about 2am.


I still stack in Registax.  Four years of practice.  finkh.wordpress.com  There's a lot of feedback in the program while it is processing:  pictures, graphs, progress bars, counters.  Astro IIDC is pretty secretive; a counter.  


Astro IIDC has terrific exposure control, especially with a terrific camera, and that was the greatest weakness with webcams.  I used K3CCD for capture with the Philips toucam, sp900, and logitech fusion.  Now I use a Point Grey monochrome Scorpion thanks to a hot tip here ($225 for a scorpion; I paid $75 for the fusion and had to glue on an eyepiece barrel to use it).


In Astro IIDC I've tried setting quality to zero, search area to 15 pixels, 32x32 Fast, no extra sharpening, and the program runs through the frames and never returns anything.   I've had results in the past stacking, so I know the program works, but the images were blurred.   Now nothing is returned.  I'm expecting a single tif to appear on the screen.  The raw capture has local movement  (turbulent cells) and general drift due to sloppy polar alignment and ten-year-old hardware. 


I've read the manual a few times, but intended to work through the group history to get some tips. 

My day job is on a helpdesk, so the processing can run in the background or on another computer while I'm on the phone.  


I learned about the trim command in Quicktime player the hard way when a 3 Gb capture would not convert to avi; there's a 4Gb limit on the avi.  I used to think 1Gb was a big file.  


My first computer was an IBM 1620 in 1967.  Ten meg hard drive and 2k ram.  In 1986, I started work as a computer operator at the Academic Computing Facility of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University.  The location has changed but I'm still doing pretty much the same job:  helping people use computers.


Howard Fink



















At 11:39 AM 11/10/2009, you wrote:

  


Hi Howard;


Nice images.


Are you still stacking them in the Registax or have you tried to doing 

them in Astro IIDC yet?


If you have questions on Astro IIDC stacking (the manual discusses 

what things do, but not so much on how to do them) and I'll see if I 

can either refer you to something hat has been discussed already on 

the Yahoo group (from the messages I have cached that I can find) or 

answer your questions directly.


And the Yahoo search function is completely screwed up, which is why I 

have been considering moving to something like Google Groups or 

something else as a host. The only way I can find specific articles is 

to find the date they were published and manually flip through them to 

get to there.


TTYL..


Milton Aupperle


On 9-Nov-09, at 10:07 PM, Howard wrote:


> Two minutes on the roof, two hours on the computer.

>

> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Astro_IIDC/photos/album/275060372/pic/1682187824/view?picmode=original&mode=tn&order=ordinal&start=1&dir=asc 

>

> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Astro_IIDC/photos/album/275060372/pic/724502301/view?picmode=original&mode=tn&order=ordinal&start=1&dir=asc 

>

> Two of the best pictures I've ever taken. Thank you, Milton for 

> both Astro IIDC and this newsgroup.

>

> Howard Fink