Beginner's guide to stacking planetary images with AutoStakkert!2

[knobby]

Not sure but I believe if you click on the do all button it goes through all the edits you've made and tidies it all up?

[JamesF]

You should be told you need to "do all" before saving if you haven't already.

Not sure why the image is pixellated in the first place though.  Have you done a fairly heavy resize on it?  I think the "zoomed view" is just that -- it affects what you see on the screen, but doesn't do anything to the image itself.

James

[LeeWilky]

Yep ive done the do all before saving and it comes out as it looks on the screen.  Its a fairly heavy resize as the image is from a DSLR byt i dont understand why it looks so much better in the zoom view than it does on the final image lol.  I just cant get my final image to match the quality of the zoomed image.

[LeeWilky]

Aha sorted it!  I clicked on the resize image button and then saved it from there and it seems to be fine now.  How strange.

Thanks for yout help ill have a go at proper processing now i did this one in a hurry just then

 

[JessicaFaye]

This is a brilliant guide thank you JamesF!! I'm in the process of buying a Canon 1000D to start doing some AP and I have a SW ST80. I'm completely new to all this so tutorials like this are a gem!

[JessicaFaye]

Lovely pic of Jupiter too LeeWilky, glad you got sorted! Worth the effort!

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[LeeWilky]

This is a brilliant guide thank you JamesF!! I'm in the process of buying a Canon 1000D to start doing some AP and I have a SW ST80. I'm completely new to all this so tutorials like this are a gem!

Its a fantastic tutorial!  I have gone from never taking a pic of jupiter to these in less than half an hour thanks to this and you can see why im whinging on the other thread about the clouds when Io is currently transitting lol.

The pics arnt great as they are taken with a DSLR but better than i expected

   

[JessicaFaye]

Its a fantastic tutorial! I have gone from never taking a pic of jupiter to these in less than half an hour thanks to this and you can see why im whinging on the other thread about the clouds when Io is currently transitting lol.

The pics arnt great as they are taken with a DSLR but better than i expected

I'm so excited to get started myself!! It's so hard when it's all abbreviations acronyms and software, but I'm sure I'll get there! I think they are great pics, such a shame you can't get out for a snap of the Io transit

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[LeeWilky]

Yep gutted too.  Plenty more time in life for that   Gives me a chance to finish modifying my Xbox webcam and get some better quality pics tho so not too bad.

[tich]

A question for James, I've tried using this program doing a full lunar image but AS!2 keeps cutting a huge chunk off it for some reason. I've tried different settings but not having any joy, any ideas?

[Christopher Davenport]

Thanks for this tut it has taken my planetary from zero to hero.

By the way, I need some advice on imaging Jup.

(I too have a 127 Mak cas at f12)

What is the longest to expose before rotation effects?

Is it better to Barlow up to f24 or f48?

I usually capture images as bmp instead of video.

And don't use raw as debaur is complex and does it at value on a stack of 2000+?

Sorry for all the questions but I am gonna go for broke this weekend on next gap in clouds.

Thanks for any advice and keep up the good work.

[Christopher Davenport]

Ps last attempt at 990 images.

http://stargazerslounge.com/uploads/gallery/album_2903/gallery_32740_2903_5622.jpg

[JamesF]

A question for James, I've tried using this program doing a full lunar image but AS!2 keeps cutting a huge chunk off it for some reason. I've tried different settings but not having any joy, any ideas?

I'm not sure why this should be.  I process my full disc lunar images a different way because they're quite large and AS!2 doesn't seem to handle large images very well:

http://stargazerslounge.com/topic/184192-full-disc-lunar-imaging-with-a-dslr/

James

[JamesF]

Ps last attempt at 990 images.

http://stargazerslounge.com/uploads/gallery/album_2903/gallery_32740_2903_5622.jpg

I'd try rebalancing the colours slightly on that one, but there seems to be plenty of detail there to start with so I'd say you've done well with that one.

James

[JamesF]

Thanks for this tut it has taken my planetary from zero to hero.

By the way, I need some advice on imaging Jup.

(I too have a 127 Mak cas at f12)

What is the longest to expose before rotation effects?

Is it better to Barlow up to f24 or f48?

I usually capture images as bmp instead of video.

And don't use raw as debaur is complex and does it at value on a stack of 2000+?

I'd not suggest capturing longer than three minutes, but it depends on the focal ratio and camera that you're using.

I'd suggest f/24 would be a better bet than f/48.  The latter is likely to make it tough to keep the target on the camera sensor.  Again it depends on the camera though.

I prefer a single file for capture as it removes the overhead of opening and closing files (and video also tends to be a lot more compact than bmp).  Capturing at high frame rates is liable to make disc IO a bottleneck.

There may well be dozens of proposed algorithms for debayering/demosaicking images.  Some are fast, but don't tend to produce a particularly high fidelity image whilst other slower methods produce much better results.  Because time is a factor and processing power is limited the implementations in camera firmware tend to be at the lower end of the scale in terms of quality of output.  Doing the same processing externally may well produce better results regardless of the number of frames captured therefore.

James

[JamesF]

Oh, I forgot to mention.  This may be helpful:

http://www.tanstaafl.co.uk/2012/03/focal-ratio-capture-length-planetary-imaging/

James

[tich]

I'm not sure why this should be.  I process my full disc lunar images a different way because they're quite large and AS!2 doesn't seem to handle large images very well:

http://stargazerslounge.com/topic/184192-full-disc-lunar-imaging-with-a-dslr/

James

Thanks James I'm glad it's not just me then, I could stack the images ok when using the C80ED but using the SCT I'm guessing it's just to large so I run them through PIPP & Registax which seems to cope better now I've upgraded the memory.

[adavies8900]

Got abit of a problem. Just giving this ago but cant drag any of my pictures. Any suggestions

[JamesF]

Got abit of a problem. Just giving this ago but cant drag any of my pictures. Any suggestions

You mean dragging them onto the AS!2 application?

James

[adavies8900]

I figured it out sorry

[Savo83]

This is  great guide James.  You're extremely helpful on here

[egidio]

Please, James... help me =(

I wanna to start by telling that i might already know what the problem is, but i just want a confirmation...

The seeing wasn't so good as at some point i spotted some invisible cluds and the telescope wasn't acclimated because i was outside just 5 minutes or so. I took my Olympus and put it inside the barlow:

then of course i put everything in my focuser and i started filming Jupiter, manual tracking (i have an Orion XT12i)

Now, the 2 minutes videos is in MTS aka an AVCHD file...i converted it in AVI then put it on PIPP just as James did, it cropped it and everything, then put the new avi file into Autostakkert and did all the process, with the same exact parameters as James...now, with the processed image (from 4000 frames) I can't actually change much because the image would just get distoreted and become funny and all. What am I doing doing wrong? Was it the bad seeing? Do I need a longer video? Is it the converting to avchd to avi? Or maybe it was a bad focus? Honestly the initial image doesn't seem bad, not more than any "initial image" i see everywhere...like James's saturn for example, and then he transformed it into a masterpiece. Tomorrow I will try to chose 720p AVI in the camera instead of 1080p AVCHD. If I give you the original AVCHD file can u try to see if the video is bad and not me? ahahahaha, so I can finally sleep well... =P

this is the file: http://www.filedropper.com/00001_1

and this is the max i was able to pull out (with photoshop, registax would just make it weird...i just don't know why, maybe the stacked frames are just poor of informations?)

[JamesF]

I think that using AVCHD is probably not a good idea.  Under the hood it's probably using lossy compression on the image data which is unhelpful.  If you can get a lossless AVI format from the camera that would be great, but it's entirely possible the camera just won't do that in which case I'm afraid you're going to struggle to get decent images out of it.

I do also wonder if the camera just isn't sensitive enough for planetary imaging.

James

[egidio]

I think that using AVCHD is probably not a good idea.  Under the hood it's probably using lossy compression on the image data which is unhelpful.  If you can get a lossless AVI format from the camera that would be great, but it's entirely possible the camera just won't do that in which case I'm afraid you're going to struggle to get decent images out of it.

I do also wonder if the camera just isn't sensitive enough for planetary imaging.

James

I though AVCHD was lossless? Anyway, there is even 720p 60fps that i can try, and then the last resort would be the 720p AVI, how can I disover if it's lossless or not?

[egidio]

this is the codec for the AVI 720P in my camera: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_JPEG