Bit of coding and my 383 is now an integrating video camera :D

[NickK]

Yup - as a focusing tool it *really* works well (remember this is through glass wet with rain):

The brighter target (the cloud cover thinned.. the sun almost came out!), the faster the exposure and the less chance the wind and rain outside has to cause an issue. Note the graph is up from the previous exposure. Here I've switched off alignment and stacking to just give me a focusing readout. I still have PSF deconv running.

[NickK]

Hole in the black clouds - sat in the conservatory, shooting through the roof glass but better than getting a wet surprise every 30 minutes. Simply sat here with the scope on the mount but no power (hand moving the mount every so often to 'track'):

So now the pipeline can align, grade, deconv, stack (with defined graded), but also do live video based alignment without stacking. I think the detail system works, but I may also add a spot 'region' to provide focusing on the region. The idea of non-stacking alignment is simple - you don't have to keep prodding the mount

I've broken the pipeline up a little but I think next is a set of objective tests - as always dogfooding has shown some issues (clouds being one). It's good that the system picks up the clouds resulting in a drop of quality.

I've also been thinking about a auto-exposure adjustment, probably using the grading - so if the target region is burning out or under exposed, the system auto adjusts the exposure.

This week is going to be complicated (think board level) and the outlaws are appearing so I'll probably not have much time other than getting some file based testing done and connecting up the GUI HID options.

[NickK]

Well I'm on vacation.. but we have family around now with just two nieces meant a shopping trip in guildford.. leaving me in peace and quiet

I managed to nail the chaotic behaviour every 50 or so frames - this was down to a couple of bugs in the correlation peak sub-pixel evaluation. Now this is nice and stable.

Henry the cat has been invaluable - it's metal and moves in the wind on a spring, making a great test subject

I got polar aligned yesterday but the clouds rolled in, killing a dogfooding session :/ I appears the same is true for my solar dog folding just now lol

[NickK]

Just to show you the effect of sub-pixel drizzle stacking- one a simple zoom using Preview. Through the conservatory window again..

The next sub-pixel drizzle stacking with drizzle - first using L3 with bilinear rotate, the other using L3+L3. Stacking is a simple S'=(S+I)/2 but for now that works.

So I figure there's a couple more bugs in the code (probably my L3 implementation!).. but getting there.

Not bad for the small chip at 659x495 pixels! The region above is 150x112 source pixels so that's not bad.

edit: reshot the bad ratio after fixing it..

[NickK]

Updating to 10.9…. that will allow both GPUs and CPU to be used for OpenCL.. 

[Cath]

Another addicted image processing coder

[NickK]

Ahh problem is having the day job and the home life leaves little for anything at the moment! May get the scope out for *gasp* some visual tonight!