From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: June 7, 2011 9:36:35 AM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Was More solar images from the weekend, now AstroIIDC stacking results


Hi Jim;


Glad it worked out for you.


On 7-Jun-11, at 4:45 AM, matt carmine wrote:


After the humiliating 8-1 defeat of Boston over Vancouver (I lived in Vancouver for 7 years and saw them through the 1994 campaign), I needed something to restore my faith in the world.


I quit watching after it hit 5:1 :(


They have pretty well done that for one game in each series - losing one game very badly and melting down.



Taking Milton's excellent suggestion of stacking with histogram expansion on, sharpening of subs, a 64x64 area with pixel variance of 7 and choosing 11 MAPs, I stacked about 60 of the best out of 300 frames.  The result was stunningly improved (right side is original effort):


http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4852049/AR11228compared.jpg



What was even more impressive is that because I don't use MAPs very often I didn't realize AstroIIDC had evolved to the point where it even makes a blended MAP image.  I was expecting I would have to assemble my own in PS.


You may also want to use:


"Don't blend in a stack if # of frames drops below xxxx of expected."


when stacking to and a value of about 80%. That prevents Astro IIDC from adding in a MAP area that it got poor alignment for to the Master MAP blended image. If this happens, when you sharpen the image in post processing you can see it because it will have more noise as it has fewer images.


I use the "histogram expansion" pretty much all the time now for Lunar stacking for MAP. It does add some time to the processing, but I think the results speak for themselves.


Lastly if  you use the 4.06.06 Beta 3 version, it has more SSE3 3 optimizations and can process faster too.


TTYL..


Milton Aupperle