From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: February 11, 2010 4:51:14 PM MST

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Re: Stacking slow?

Hi Dodi;

On 11-Feb-10, at 4:18 PM, digidodi wrote:

Hi Milton,

As soon as the stacking is finished, I will capture it. The mac is still crawling on now, don't want to interrupt anything for the moment. Do I send it to you or post it? Not sure how big the log file will be. Haven't looked at it yet.

Send it to me using our support listed address:

http://www.outcastsoft.com/ASCASTROIIDC.html#SUPPORT

The text logs are only a few kilobytes.

I suspect what you've done is use a large selection area that completely includes the disk of Mars. You don't get better matching by selecting a big area, just a slow Mac. Pick a Limb or Polar area and use 32x32 to 64x64 size will run things will run a lot faster and usually be just as good as 128 or 192 etc.

The only time you really do need to use the larger sizes is if your upscaling the frames for subpixel alignment.

The second possibility is you have high noise, dark image and a very low pixel matching tolerance which basically is making it impossible to match up. So it winds up searching the entire frame and finding very little to match against.

Using the "Gaussian blur the frames used for sharpness estimation & alignment"" and the "Histogram expand brightness of all frames used for pixel alignment" stacking options may help if it's noisy and dark.

HTH..

Milton Aupperle

Dodi

--- In Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com, Milton Aupperle <milton@...> wrote:

We need to see your resulting Stacking log file to see what options

your using to even make a guess at what your doing.

Milton Aupperle

On 11-Feb-10, at 3:14 PM, digidodi wrote:

Hi,

I am new to Astro II DC, coming from a Windows PC, now working with

Mac for astrophotography. All seems to work fine, but the stacking

is very slow compared to eg Registax on Windows. I tried Mars

tonight, which takes a very long time to stack out of film of 3000

images. I am using a dual core 2.6Ghz notebook pro.

I tried to speed it up by making the selection region for sharpness

estimates the center quadrant, and next selecting a user selected

area for stacking of small size. The initial sharpness estimation

goes very fast, but the stacking itself crawls through the movie.

Am I missing something? Doing something wrong?

Dodi