From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: November 10, 2009 11:24:57 AM MST

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

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


Hi Howard;


On 10-Nov-09, at 10:31 AM, Howard Fink wrote:

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.  


That's only if your running in full Automatic mode which means you want no intervention. Usually that's not what anyone uses for doing high quality work.


If you want interactive, you have interactive:


1) Check mark "Display sharpness histogram" and it shows you the histogram count of the sharpness estimation. You can visually decide what percentage of frames to to use for stacking form the Graph. (see page 31 and 40 to 42 in the manual).


2) Check "Manually select frames for stacking" and is shows you all the frames that were selected above the sharpness cutoff, so you can remove anything that is soft and reset which frame is the matching frame (see page 31 and 42 to 43 in the manual).


3) Select the "Manual Selected" item from the  "Use Manual Selected pixel areas for fine alignment" pop up menu and it allows you to select what area(s) to align with (see page 33 and 43 to 47 in the manual).


4) Check mark the "Create blended MAP image from manually selected pixel areas." check box and it will allow you to create blended MAP from the multiple selection points you did (see page 34).


So there you go for interactivity\ it can be form zero to full - your choice.


As to throwing up tiny little images of what it's stacking, that chews through a lot of CPU cycles for no real benefit, especially how dog slow CoreGraphics is.



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.  


There's no "Quality" settings in the window (except for Bayer Video decode which your not shooting anyhow and that's a check box) , so I'm not sure what your talking about here. The Search area is set as a block size (i.e 32x32) and the "15 pixels" is matching tolerance. Again, this is all explained in detail in the Manual between pages 30 to 48.


Now nothing is returned.  I'm expecting a single tif to appear on the screen. 


It never pops up a window with the result of a stack, it quietly puts them into your specified folder with all the particulars of the stack (your settings, the number of frames processed and stacked etc.) in the movie log file. It's designed to be unobtrusive not invasive.


As to nothing returned, did you select where the files are supposed to be saved to, especially with remove able media present (see ""Select default folder for saving stacked frame(s) to..."" button on page 31)? That's where all files and logs are saved to automagically.


With Tiger, the OS always notifies us if it can't create a file at your specified location. Under Leper or Snow Leper, OS X  may not even tell us it failed to find the location and save it somewhere else, especially if your using the Desktop as your saving point. I've file bug reports on this, but Apple ignores them because it doesn't affect their products - just 3rd party ones.


The raw capture has local movement  (turbulent cells) and general drift due to sloppy polar alignment and ten-year-old hardware. 


That's pretty standard. If you want to see the stuff I wind up stacking see:


http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Astro_IIDC/files/Planetary/SaturnAverageSeeing_MJA20090404.mp4


That's average to slightly below average. I was going to capture the moons of Saturn moving over time, but changed my mind :)


HTH..


Milton J. Aupperle