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Rupes Recta / Montes Apenninus - PIPP Dev Testing


Blazar

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As I have been taking quite a lot of close up Lunar shots, The creator of PIPP (Chris - CGARRY on this forum), asked if I (along with others) would like to have a play with a new version including a surface stabilisation feature. The feature helps pull an image out even when the conditions are not the best. So the wind was blowing quite heavily at 19mph but thought I might as well give it a go.

So setting up was fun, and then trying to focus was not the easiest thing to do when trying to actually see something on screen (also I could not get an exact reading on the exposure either). I moved the car up the driveway a bit to try and deflect a little of the wind, but that did not have too much of an effect. I took several AVI's with the scope bouncing all over the place with rare moments of calm. I took 14 runs, then decided it was way to wild, and was getting worried about the stability of the rig, especially as the drive is on a slope. Packed up and headed in.

The new feature in PIPP has an 'Anchor Frame box' (AFB) which can be resized to fit around an object you wish to process the AVI around ( PIPP will then search for it in all subsequent frames in order to shift them into alignment). Just using this allows a fixed point of reference. The larger the AFB the longer the expected processing time, but I found it to be a minor increase (using an older pc as well). You can also ask PIPP to now use and 'Area of Interest' (AOI). in conjunction with the AFB,  You can set an overall area that is the feature of your image. Additional options allow you to crop to this area as well as other features. If you add a large AOI to a Large AFB it will add to the processing time again (so use them wisely).

Now the images I have chosen I have just used PIPP to do the AFB only, then into AS!2 and RS6. I have left the pre-processing artefacts just to show that I was able to pull out an image and how much the camera and scope were moving about. Please remember this is a development version, so there may be additional changes made by Chris, which will improve an already superb piece of software. I also intend to re-process the avi's to see what is the best method and sizes etc of AFB and AOI to get the best results.

I can see this addition to be really helpful even on still evenings....and will only help to improve the caliber of images produced for both lunar and planetary targets. I intend to images these targets again on a more 'non combative' evening ;-)

Thanks for looking, and thanks to Chris for the app in the first place. 

Rupes Recta (The straight wall) - No cropping or image enhancement carried out. a stack of 140 frames of 1433 (total before stabilisation), Camera temp 7.2degrees, Exposure 7ms

Summary:

PIPP version: v2.4.4.dev.4
  Total input frames: 1433
  Frames discarded with no stabilisation feature found: 163
  Total output frames: 1270:

gallery_27945_3180_3033302.png

Montes Apenninus - No cropping or image enhancement carried out. a stack of 115 frames of 1042 (total before stabilisation), Camera temp 7.2degrees, Exposure 7ms

Summary:
PIPP version: v2.4.4.dev.4
  Total input frames: 1042
  Total output frames: 1042:
  Output Frame Type: Monochrome
gallery_27945_3180_1052865.png
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Astounding - especially image number 2.  The border effect (I assume a result of PIPP's attempt to rectify the 'bouncing scope') is strangely hypnotic...

I've only just started using PIPP.  It certainly saves time, but I am not sure if I am using it properly.  Are there any tutorials for it anywhere?

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Thanks Gnomus. It was an interesting imaging session. The border 'effect' is actually from sticking the output from the anchored PIPP AVI, so there is something going on, but yes it does highlight how much movement was happening. Chris did mention what he thought he knew what was happening with the interaction between the applications.

I think Chris has a lot of tutorials on the PIPP website, though obviously this new version when released will need some additional advice on usage scenarios. does not look like many clear nights this week, and the moon phase is not that great at the mo (IMO)..

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To pull images like that out of your data from an evening that you wouldn't normally have tried to image on, were you not testing this software, is very promising! I use PIPP all the time with my planetary imaging and can't wait until this version is released.

gnomus: On the PIPP web site, have a look under the Navigation heading, there is a option called Example Usage. Click on that and it gives you lots of different tutorials.

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Hi Blazar,

I have had a quick play with the test video you shared with me using an AOI to avoid the black bars while centring the videos.  Here are the AFB and the AOI that I used:

post-9259-0-05310000-1423486528_thumb.pn

Obviously a few more frame were thrown away:

  Summary:
    PIPP version: v2.4.4.dev.5
    Total input frames: 1433
    Frames discarded with no stabilisation feature found: 44
    Frames discarded with no area of interest found: 545
    Total output frames: 844

And this is the resulting image after stacking the best 500 frames in AS!2 with some very quick and dirty wavelets applied:

post-9259-0-84503400-1423486582_thumb.pn

Cheers,

Chris

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Chris that seems to work really well....was that the largest AOI?

 The AOI that I used was just quickly selected to see how many frames would be discarded.  I think I brought it in 100 pixels or so from each edge.

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