From: "milton_aupperle" <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: February 25, 2010 12:56:58 PM MST

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: REPORT: Experiment with a pretty big focal length X Mark Gaffney

Guys;

If you want to chat about non Astro IIDC stuff, please do it directly to each other, NOT on this list.

The list is about Astro IIDC and Astro IIDC related issues. It is not about Windows, Windows Drivers, TIS Tech support etc.

So please try and stay on topic so that I don't have to do this again.

Milton Aupperle

--- In Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com, Mark Gaffney <markgaffney@...> wrote:

Still haven`t quite solved it yet..I don`t know if he`s finished for

the day? Looking on an app I`ve just got on my iPod Touch I see that

it`s dark now in Europe (sun`s out in the Atlantic beyond England) As

I`m writing it`s 6.20 am & UTC is 19.20 so I guess it`s13 hours

different...

Mark.

On 26/02/2010, at 4:45 AM, albe albo wrote:

Hi Mark,

i'm glad that Stefan answered promptly.

I hope that now you will be able to solve you problem too.

How many hours of difference you have from UT?

Mine is +1

TTYL

Da: Mark Gaffney <markgaffney@...>

A: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Inviato: Gio 25 febbraio 2010, 17:27:02

Oggetto: Re: [Astro_IIDC] REPORT: Experiment with a pretty big focal

length X Mark Gaffney

Hi Alberto,

I got a response within minutes! I`m told the Taiwan office was

closed recently because of Chinese New Year. My plan was to wait

another few days & try again..Stefan mentions using the "Device

Manager" & the "Hardware Upgrade Wizard" to re-install the Microsoft

drivers...

I`ll try this soon..might get another couple of hours sleep first.

I`m often up at what we call the "witching hour" ( past 12 am) when

I look at my messages then return to bed after a cup of coffee & a

snack..!

Mark.

On 26/02/2010, at 2:53 AM, Mark Gaffney wrote:

Hi Alberto,

Thanks for your trouble, I`ve just contacted Stefan via the email

address he provides...Here` s the text of the message...

Hi Stefan,

In response to my message to Alberto Albo & his enquiry...I` ve

contacted the Asian department of The Imaging Source before &

always got prompt responses in the past. This time however it`s

been two weeks at least since my first enquiry & no reply. The TIS

DBK 21A F04.AS camera is opening on all the applications which will

run it on both my Macs (Mac Mini G4 & iBook G4- Astro IIDC,

Craterlet & PHD) but not on IC Capture.AS 2.0, Metaguide or PHD on

the PC. However my PGR cameras are both opening through Fly Capture

on the same PC using the same firewire cable...? I`ve recently

downloaded directx-feb2010- redst & reinstalled version

tiscam-4.1.1. 1-tis but it`s still saying "The wizard did not find

any supported devices. Please connect the devices you want to

update". If I open IC Capture.AS 2.0 under Select Device it still

says <No Devices found> This has me perplexed as the PC connection

was working 2-3 months ago perfectly well..

Mark Gaffney.

Yours, Mark.

On 26/02/2010, at 12:30 AM, albe albo wrote:

Mark,

during my mail exchange with the TIS engineers i couldn't avoid to

refer your "disenchantation" .

At the end of an email i asked them about your problem:

You has been very responsive with me and my problems so i'm

puzzled when a australian friend of mine wrote me such words after

i spoke enthusiastically about your seriousness:

"A bit OT here but I`m rather disenchanted with TIS at present as

I`ve tried to contact them twice recently without a response! I`ve

had trouble connecting my TIS DBK 21A F04.AS to anything on my PC

of late. It`s not the firewire cable as both PGR cameras are

working with it (through the PC) & not the camera as it`s still

working perfectly well through Astro IIDC & other apps on my

Macs...!!"

What could i say to him?

So Mr. Stefan Geissler from TIS (Germany) answered:

Regarding your Australian friend: The support in Pacific region is

done by my colleagues in Taiwan. Thus I

may not be involved.

However, he wrotes, the camera is not recognized on the Windows PC

and on the Mac? In this case, I

suspect, the camera is damaged. In Windows, he can check the

Device Manager. If the camera is not

listed there, then either the camera is defect or the PGR FireWire

board driver disables detection

of our camera. Also, if a laptop is in use, the FireWire cameras

must be powered externally. But I

guess, he knows this. He may sent an email to support@imagingcont

rol.com and address me directly.

Mark, Did you solve such problem already?

Ciao!

Alberto

Da: Mark Gaffney <markgaffney@ me.com>

A: Astro_IIDC@yahoogro ups.com

Inviato: Gio 25 febbraio 2010, 00:54:21

Oggetto: Re: [Astro_IIDC] REPORT: Experiment with a pretty big

focal length (C11 @ f.92 = 26 meters)

A bit OT here but I`m rather disenchanted with TIS at present as

I`ve tried to contact them twice recently without a response! I`ve

had trouble connecting my TIS DBK 21A F04.AS to anything on my PC

of late. It`s not the firewire cable as both PGR cameras are

working with it (through the PC) & not the camera as it`s still

working perfectly well through Astro IIDC & other apps on my

Macs...!!

Mark.

On 25/02/2010, at 10:39 AM, Mark Gaffney wrote:

Hi Alberto,

I`ve been able to open your new Mars images on my PC this

morning! In the trade off between buying a TIS camera with a

greater resolution (31 or 41 series) I decided nearly a year ago

to go with a 7.4 micron PGR Flea 2, 640 x 480 pixel camera. It

cost a cool $1400 new! There seemed little prospect I`d be

beginning LRGB imaging any time soon back then so I chose the

colour version. It gives a smaller but finer image. With the

addition of the Scorpion 20SO to my stable of CCD`s I now have

the option of monochrome & LRGB imaging although at only 4.4

microns square for this camera...A similar Flea B/W would be nice

& there was one available from the eBay seller Tim posted the

information about, however I`d run out of spending money by that

time..

It is very interesting seeing you pushing your TIS cameras to the

limit to of their endurance... !

Mark.

On 25/02/2010, at 7:07 AM, albe albo wrote:

Thank you Milton thank you Ray.

Milton the teoric limit is the one I'm trying to verify with

such try.

I know the mathematical formulas: they seems absolute but...

perhaps for a single shot without atmosphere.

The summing method and the seeing seems to modify a little that

possibility.

I'd like to find that perhaps with such focal length i could

resolve less than 10 pixels... perhaps 7 or 6.

Watching the video while i was grabbing it sometimes showed some

nice detail.

For such reason i'd like to own a ideal camera that could allow

me to go to 60 fps with good brightness and no noise.

The diagonal pattern is moving. Summing the frames UNALIGNED

produce a pattern free stack while aligning even a gray flat

patterned field produce a patterned stack.

Here the link to the files that i sent to TIS:

http://dl.dropbox. com/u/1094920/ DMK31AF03. AS-Pattern- Mayer-

NoMovies. zip

I have the 100 frames original movies too and it would be not

important to recompress them if necessary.

About the sharpness/contrast.

Ok for what you say about smallest details but about

the...macrosharpnes s (big details) i was thinking to the

possibility to increase the contrast a lot (only temporarily

during the estimation process) and to assign a variable blur

radius in order to cut off some medium-high frequencies (noise

and not precious details in this case) allowing to choose among

details of a certain given size.

Watching my movies:

What about downloading my IR movie (for thr moment) already

cropped and aligned and recompressed APPLE-PIXLET highest quality?

I compared pixel x pixel the 2 compressions and the difference

is really minimal so that i always recompress my movies after my

processing including the DSO.

The ir movie is less than 500 megabytes... .

TTYL

Alberto

Da: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft. com>

A: Astro_IIDC@yahoogro ups.com

Inviato: Mer 24 febbraio 2010, 19:23:59

Oggetto: Re: [Astro_IIDC] REPORT: Experiment with a pretty big

focal length (C11 @ f.92 = 26 meters)

Hi Alberto;

When your at those extreme focal lengths, why not try binning

2x2 (or even 4x4) when capturing? It will be 4x (or 16x)

brighter so you can reduce the noise levels or increase frame

rate and I doubt your losing much detail. Your way over the

theoretical resolution limits anyhow for F 92 on a per pixel

basis. Your image scale is about 0.0345 arc seconds per pixel

(about 376 pixel wide disk and about 13 Arc Seconds in real

size). Smallest feature resolvable by a C11 is likely around 10

pixels or 0.345 arc seconds, so with 4x4 binning, you'd likely

lose nothing. And let's not forget, there is no loss in size of

the image with my "forward sum" binning method either so the

image stays the same size and scale.

Something you really long focal length shooters need to remember

is that sharpness is a measure of contrast (change in brightness

as in light to dark) over distance, so the less contrast you

have or the wider the spacing between the light to dark area,

the less sharpness there is.

With dark images (your blue image for example) that have

basically no contrast, therefore sharpness is likely only

influenced by noise which there is a lot of.

In your brightest case (IR image) , the faint features on Mars

are so diffuse that they don't even play any part in sharpness

estimate and get lost in the noise. The only thing that will be

perceived is the diffuse disk edge. And this "edge" is spread

over about a 50 pixel distance and reflects a change of around

50 to 70 value over that distance, so that really isn't much

gradient at all.

Add to this all the noise in the images which is causing each

pixel to change value by up to 14 between frames and adjacent

pixels (I've measured this in the past and posted the Gain

versus Noise statistic for these cameras on the list) and it's

no wonder to me it can not figure out which frame is or isn't

sharp.

The other issue is that what you consider to be blurry may not

be from a contrast / over distance perspective. A double image

due to turbulence can produce a better edge than what you

consider being a sharp frame. One thing I have been seeing

lately here is a very fast high frequency (small scale) ripple

turbulence, which produces double features in the same frame

(even at 5 ms exposures) , separated by 0.1 to 0.3 arc seconds.

So a single sharp edge now has two sharp edges one offset from

the other. Those frames actually come out as having a higher

sharpness rating because they have more edges. I weeded out

most of them manually, but you can still see it in 2.5x barlow

inset image of Aristarchus here:

http://www.outcasts oft.com/AstroIma ges/SRArisOcePro

c_20100126. jpg

if you look closely.

I have been testing a way that allows you to select the spatial

distance for measuring sharpness, but it takes a lot of time to

work it all through, and I'm not yet convinced it will make any

difference. For example, once you hit a certain size with some

movies of different Astro targets, it makes no differences as

far as what frames it selects for increasing distance (always

the same order and same frames). And the sharpness algorithm is

different for Lunar and Planetary sources too, as Lunar tends to

have sharper edges where as Planetary doesn't, so I'm having to

run a lot of tests before I can draw a conclusion as to if it's

"better" or not.

If you want to send me your movies on a CD (or DVD as the case

may be for movie sizes) be like Jim (and Allan has) so I can

look at them and test with them, that would be great. If not, I

have to make do with what I have shot and my seeing is nearly

always turbulence limited, so I can't go beyond 5 meter focal

lengths.

Lastly, your diagonal noise is referred to as Fixed Pattern

Noise. If it doesn't move laterally (the Texas Instrument

TLSV1501 chip set FW cameras had this very bad) and is constant

in position, then stacking lots of frames will not remove it, it

will make it far more noticeable as it will be perceived as

"signal". You might be able to remove it using a say 255

averaged flat frame images of a uniformly gray area (wouldn't

even need to be done on the telescope, as it's camera noise),

but you need to have the camera at those same high gain levels

and at that temperature to duplicate it. With the Texas

Instruments based cameras, the pattern would change as the

temperature changed, so for the first 5 minutes the line

orientation was all over the place until it reached thermal

equilibrium and then it was fairly constant. An example of it is

shown in:

http://www.outcasts oft.com/AstroIma ges/MVMJS_ 04_03_28. jpg

where you can see it in the browner edge areas of Jupiter.

HTH..

Milton Aupperle

On 24-Feb-10, at 8:44 AM, albe albo wrote:

Hello to all,

some days before the 74" telescope image published by Jim, i

did my BIG experiment pushing my new C11 at f. 92 .

http://tech. groups.yahoo. com/group/ Astro_IIDC/ files/

Planetary/ 100207-BigMars- Mayer.jpg

I know that i'm out of the theoretical resolution power for

that OTA but i noticed that many amateur astronomers went

beyond their OTA limit perhaps because of the multi image

stacking that in the latest years changed the methods of

creating lunar and planetary images freezing and then averaging

the seeing deformations.

Perhaps we are "exploiting" the seeing which could behave like

an additional lens modifying the characteristic of the OTA.

Even reading the book written by Mobberley i noticed that he

had the suspect about the different limits in webcam astronomy.

Considering the defects of my image (noise and blurriness) i

was pleasantly surprised by it because there are lot of

obstacles with such focal length.

1) The camera worked at 15 fps but the gain was almost at the

upper limit for each channel with very high levels of noise. I

didn't want to lower the fps at 7.5. In addition my DMK31 shows

a lot of diagonal banding when it's used at 15 fps with a very

high gain.

2) even if the camera gain was at max the level of the CCD

illumination is still low.

3) With such magnifications i guess that even the eyepiece that

i used for the the projection becomes a very critical component

of the optical chain because of its extreme usage (9mm

orthoscopic by University Optics).

4) Another serious problem is that it is almost impossible to

perform a decent automatic selection between the good and the

bad frames even if some good frames are present! Often i find

very good frames alternated with useless blobs both classified

at the top of the "sharpest frames". Since I took 3400 image x

channel it's hard to select them manually!

5) an unexpected problem was represented by the big size of the

planet that clearly shows the rotation more than smaller size

not allowing very long sessions of IR-R-G-B sequences. In this

case from the beginning to the end the sequence took 20 minutes!

Note: for this sequence I did an additional mistake that

usually doesn't happens. I took this sequence as R-G-B-IR while

usually i do IR-R-G-B. For Mars it is mandatory that IR & R

must be very similar while in this case i noticed a big

rotation between R (the first) and IR (the last)

All those factors together afflict such kind of experiments not

allowing a "fair" comparison with shorter focals.

I was wondering and dreaming about a camera that could grab at

60 FPS even with such low condition of light but keeping a low

noise but i guess that such camera don't exist or it is veeery

expensive.

Example: being able to capture this huge disk with the same

speed and sensitivity of a f. 20 (60 fps&low noise) i guess

that the sharpness would increase and the noise would decrease

a lot allowing better processing and a better evaluation.

Perhaps even using a more sophisticated "magnifier" (barlow,

ocular, powermate, etc) could help for a better result.

Unfortunately i don't know a (cheap) camera that could perform

such ideal sensitivity and low noise so... for the moment i

must postpone this verification.

Nobody else experimented the TIS diagonal banding?

I'm in touch with TIS engineers and i sent them some stuff.

I noticed the banding only at 15 fps. with high gain (not at

7.5 or 3,75 or 30)

Such banding shift across the screen so that if you stack the

frames without aligning them the banding seems to cancel itself

while the banding itself seems to be used like an "hook" to

align the images otherwise after the alignment process it

should statistically disappear but, on the contrary, often it

becomes more visible.

That's all for the moment (did someone resist to read all

that? )

Cheers

Alberto

http://tech. groups.yahoo. com/group/ Astro_IIDC/ files/

Planetary/ 100207-BigMars- Mayer.jpg

Milton J. Aupperle

President

ASC - Aupperle Services and Contracting

Mac Software (Drivers, Components and Application) Specialist

#1106 - 428 Chaparral Ravine View SE.

Calgary Alberta T2X 0N2

1-(403)-453- 1624

milton@outcastsoft. com