Lodestar Live Stacking Demo Video

[Paul81]

Hi All,

I have put a video demonstrating the live stacking mode of Lodestar Live on YouTube:

http://youtu.be/ndvg7qyVTS0

Although I still have more work to do, I thought it would be good to post a video of progress. This video shows the live view of M97. The app is running in a debug mode whereby I use previously captured data in lieu of the real camera, but everything else is exactly the same, so this is representative of what you would see if you were using the app for real.

The data used is courtesy of Martin, so it was taken using his 80mm F6 scope in 30 second exposures.

In the video I flick between the raw exposure and the stacked result and it is quite a remarkable difference!!

I'll try to post a few more, I have data from myself and DoctorD too and the majority of it works quite well!

Below is the image that I saved at the end!

[Martin Meredith]

This is fantastic stuff Paul! Switching from raw to stacked view makes such a difference.

Now I'm embarrassed about those dust bunnies ;-)

Great work

Martin

[NickK]

Great work Paul!  I can appreciate the amount of work in that!

[DoctorD]

Fantastic!!

Cannot wait for the first release version and some free time to try it out.

Great work Paul.

CS

Paul

[nytecam]

Very impressive Paul - a remarkable piece of evolving software - well done :-)

[HiloDon]

I really like your demo videos, Paul. I was wondering how to zoom with your s/w and then saw you use the cursor. I've only been using a Mac since 1984, so you would think I would have figured that out myself. Had a great night last night with the Lodestar and Lodestarlive. Here's my capture of the Owl w/o stacking. Thanks for all of your efforts.

[Paul81]

Thank you all for the kind comments! 

Martin, I think the war on the dust bunnies is never ending. No matter how much you clean the sensor and optics there will always be one little critter showing its head!

Nice shot HiloDon! Glad you are having lots of fun - exactly what our hobby should be! I must write some user guides at some point, not quite as fun as hammering out code though... I plan on making a series of videos in the future with the hope that forms the bulk of the tutorials. I think watching the program in use is the best way to see all the features!

I've got a bug to fix with some of DoctorDs images, not sure this one has quite registered quite right.. Either that or space time has decided to flex in a way even Mr Scott would be proud of..

[nytecam]

Hi Paul - in LL you raised the question of colour and I of increase colour saturation.  I didn't make it clear that whilst everyday terrestial targets may have lots of colour, most DSOs beyond bright M42 etc have very little and need IMO a boost.   

SX LodestarC s/ware has saturartion settings from 1 [=normal daylight] to 9 [=hi-sat].    I found these very useful and hope you can incorporate something similar into LL.   Also a 'histogram? colour balance' option, in addition to current RGB sliders, to remove my orange LP to neutral in one hit - if possible    

Carry on the great work

[Paul81]

Hi Maurice,

Some colour saturation presets sound a good idea. I am planning to go full tilt into display processing upgrades after live stacking is complete, so hopefully stuff like this will be in 0.10 (got to get 0.9 first! Haha).

Another user has suggested an auto white balance - this will auto align the R, G and B channels. I have also been working on an auto black-white levels algorithm - I have something crude in my stacking test harness as I need a quick dump of all the images and I didn't want to have to manually set all the levels all the time. I as looking at maybe adding this in 0.10 but it needs more work.

As for live stacking, progress has been good, but slower than I hoped thanks to a busy work schedule. I have significantly 'beefed up' the algorithms - a couple of test cases have caused issues but these hopefully will be resolved with the latest round of updates. Just need to finish coding them in the test harness, sort out the bugs and then get it ported into the main code and further test. Will get there eventually! Lol!