Playing with my TAL100 Conversion...

[Notty]

and PGR Chameleon.  I'm really pleased with the resolution and quality of the images compared to my old PST with the QHY5L-II... no more Newton rings Hurrah!

Now I really need to try and get to grips with mosaics, as I feel I am in touching distance of the lower quality end of some of the images I see on here, which is saying something!  I know my PST has the hotspot problem, and I try and navigate my way around the disk to mitigate it then crop the stacked images to remove the hottest bits.  I've played with the settings in Autostich for hours but I'll be darned if I can work out why one minute it knits together 2-3 panels into a half decent knit and the next it will be a thin strip of intense white or a jumble of garbage.  I know it's a free program and the documentation is limited but to see 20 panels all overlapping nicely of similar tone that it can't join is frustrating!

Anyway here is my best knit so far, I had to go a bit overboard on the sharpening to get it to knit, but what do you all think?

[David Smith]

Wow, impressive.

[DrRobin]

Very detailed and no joins. Prior to using Autostitch I do a small amount of sharpening and then after stiching do the main amount of sharpening. It might be that a lot of sharpening is distorting the features and auto-stitch is struggling to match the features, especially if the noise has been brought up.

I also crop the image to remove bright/dark spots and also stacking artifacts around the edges prior to stitching.

What settings did you use in Autostitch to stitch this image? If Autostitch won't stitch I try MS ICE, that sometimes works where Autostitch fails.

Robin

[Montana]

That is one super fine image I'd be over the moon with an image like that

Alexandra

[Psychobilly]

Superb

I really like the results from the PGR cams...

I'm hoping the weather plays ball at kelling and I can try out sone different cams...

Peter. ..

Badly typed on my Galaxay S4 in Tapatalk4

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Very nice with loads of detail.

[Notty]

Why thank you very much for the kind comments!

Robin, also congratulations on your image in this months S@N!  It really is superb, I just wish they'd printed it larger.  My settings in Autostitch are basically as follows: 

Gain compensation enabled, but with default values as I find anything larger washes the resultant image out.

Crop settings left as default

Matching options, I try and have a large SIFT image size (pixels) around 600, with the RANSAC params very small, Alpha abut 0.5 and Beta 0.0125

Sometimes changing the rotation settings helps get a match, but I have no idea why or how it should!

How do these compare to yours?

I do a Sharpen+ before trying the mosaic of 2 value 500.  Also as you do I cropped post sharpening and try and get rid of the hotspots.

[DrRobin]

I leave Sift Image size at default of 400, set the RANSAC Alpha to 15, the Beta to 0.18 and the max iterations to 800.

I select multi-band and set the blending bands to 4 and blending sigma to 10

I select 'Gain compensation' and leave the settings at default.

I leave 'Auto Crop' selected and the values at default. I leave 'Auto Straighten' selected and the values at default.

So the only real difference is the RANSAC Alpha and Beta values, I have never tried anything so low. In fact Beta below 0.16 and it doesn't stitch for me.

I didn't know that I had a picture in S@N, could you let me know where I is please?

Robin

[Notty]

Robin, I may have been jumping to conclusions! There is a picture from a Robin Durant on P31 in the Hotshots section which looks just like one of your superb mosaics, I put 2 Robins together and made 3!  I notice you are based in Newcastle, just seen this chap is based in Brighton, sorry to get you excited!

I'm going to try your settings now, thanks for getting back to me.

[DrRobin]

Ah Robin Durant, he posts on here. I couldn't remember sending a picture in, well at least not recently. Good luck with the settings.

Robin

(The other one)

[Notty]

Hi Robin, your settings made some which didn't stitch, but some that previously stitched, not stitch!  I've now tried Autostitch, MS Ice and Hugin, and am resigned that there must be something wrong with my panels such that they won't match.  Have to wait till the sun comes out again.

The day someone comes out with a user friendly stitching program with good documentation and settings that I can understand, I'll probably part with a lot of money, because this mosaic lark is a PAIN!

[DrRobin]

I had no luck at all with Hugin, despite manually finding very good alignment points. I can get MS ICE to stitch a full disc about 40% of the time, Autostitch works about 95% of the time for me.

Autostitch is a demo program to show the capability of the stitching engine. The best known commercial product which uses this engine is Autopano Giga, which I also downloaded and tried as a trial. It wouldn't stitch any of the images I tried, which Autostitch would stitch.

When you stack your images, how many frames do you select? I use AS!2 and usually use 20% from 600 frames. Each frame has about a 50% overlap. When there is a whole frame with not too many prominent features it has the least success, then I usually adjust the settings slightly (guess) and try again.

[Luke]

Very nice image