Solar animation automatic alignment tool

[Pete Presland]

Thanks for your response, i will upload 4 tonight to see what you think of them

[Pete Presland]

these are the first 6 out of 20 i used bitmap files for the animation.

any advice gratefully recieved.

[NickK]

Yup works

Thinking that the following may be a cause of the issues:

* 8bit images may be causing an app expecting 16bit a problem,

* the border causes alignment problems if I switch on sharpening - this may be your issue.

[Pete Presland]

did you manage to create an animation with the 6 images?

[NickK]

did you manage to create an animation with the 6 images?

I could - the app currently takes images from a file and stacks by feeding the images in - when a camera is attached it will generate a sequence that effectively would animate if the stacking was set to clear between each frame.

One thing to note here - it's not going to morph the details between sub-frames. 

I could write out the aligned frames separately then we could use a separate application to produce the animation.

[GreatAttractor]

i have had a couple of goes with this to no avail,  are still working on it ?

Sorry for the delay, I haven't been checking this thread in a while. I tried imgalt v. 0.5 on these 6 files and it seems to work fine. Remember that you have to convert them to BMP or TIFF for imgalt to process them.

[Pete Presland]

does the progamme produce a gif thats saved somewhere, or do you view the animation using the programme as well?

[GreatAttractor]

No, it only produces separate aligned frames. And a good way to quickly create an animation is to open them in GIMP (Open as layers) and export as GIF using the "As animation" option. BTW, it's all in "QUICK START" and README

[Luke]

Tonight I was having trouble getting a movie to stack in Autostakkert where the Sun drifts during the movie (I was using a non-tracking mount), so thought I would see if imgalt could help.

I reduced the original video from 1400 frames to 550 in PIPP, then tried aligning these using imgalt. I had a quick flick through the frames from imgalt and removed a small number that were not aligned. Then put these back into a movie using PIPP. Hooray, it stacked!

Thank you, GreatAttractor! I am keen to try some other files now. I am getting quite a few problem movies with my grab and go, which may be because the focal length is longer now  - I switched from 400mm focal length to about 850mm.

[Pete Presland]

some nice faint proms there, very well captured!

[GreatAttractor]

I'm glad it worked, Luke. Sometimes alignment doesn't work for particularly blurred frames (the algorithm “locks onto” sharp or “high frequency” features).

[JamesF]

I managed to miss this thread originally.  Lots of interesting stuff here for me to think about.  I'm still trying to get my head around fourier transforms, convolution and deconvolution though.  I may be some time

James