Damian Peach's High Resolution Astrophotography DVD

[moxican]

I picked up mine today, and after watching it I can recommend it to anyone. I am a novice at planetary imaging but the DVD had some very useful information. He talks about AS2, Registax6, Winjupos derotation and maps. Also there are some Photoshop tutorials. Further more he goes into details about telescopes and some helpful information on how to pick one. I give two thumbs up for this one.

[Andrew INT]

Looking forward to getting a copy for my birthday next week. If I need to drop any more hints to my wife, I'll end up practically ordering it myself!

[northcanadian]

I received mine and enjoyed watching the tutorials ...lots to learn there. I notice that he uses ser files.  Are these better than avi, the same..... or???

Cheers

Roger

[JamesF]

I received mine and enjoyed watching the tutorials ...lots to learn there. I notice that he uses ser files.  Are these better than avi, the same..... or???

AVI is just a "container" format (actually, I guess SER might be considered the same).  What really matters is that the individual frames stored in either format are either not compressed at all, or at least not compressed in a manner that throws away data.  From memory, SER has no way to store formats that involve lossy compression whereas AVI does.  Any decent capture program will not use lossy compression when storing the data in an AVI file however (generally it will store exactly what comes from the camera).

SER files are probably less complex and larger for the same data.  I'm not entirely happy with them personally because the specification isn't really as tight as it should be.  In the most recent update I did try to offer as much input as possible to try to make it better defined (mostly because I was trying to add support for SER to oaCapture), but I think there are still areas where it's somewhat vague, and in fact where the "reference implementation" may well be fundamentally flawed.

So, if you're happy with AVI and you're using a lossless compression codec such as UtVideo, personally I'd stick with it.

James

[happylimpet]

gotta say ive been a bit disappointed with the DVD so far - Ive watched the sections on the subjects I feel I dont fully understand, and he glosses over the very elements I would like to know about! I'll say more when I ve finished it. I know Im far from a complete novice but there are still some weaknesses in my processing and I was hoping to be dragged up to a higher level!

[Radders]

I brought this dvd the other day and watched some on my works computer at lunch time today and I've got to say I'm a little disappointed with it so far. I've only had time watch a couple of sections but I thought it would show him with his scope(s), how he sets up, etc..

Dunno maybe it's just me but I think the price tag is quite steep for what I've seen so far.

Paul

[Barv]

Damien will give some things away but will always skip across the most important stuff, - he always has. I met him once and he suggested at the time that I purchased his DVD stating that it was on his web-site to order. Guess what? - It wasn't! I'll leave the rest up to you!

[catman161]

Part 1?! There's more?

Perhaps that copy is for the southern hemisphere market. Jupiter looks upside down to me

James

Some friends and I clubbed together a couple of years ago in 2013 and got in touch with Damian and paid for him to come and spend the day with us going through planetary image processing. It was a great day and he was a throughly nice guy with a great sense of humour.

We all learnt a lot that day. We all bought our most recent jupiter avis and we all showed him what we did in terms of processing and he went through software, processing techniques, hardware, importance of jetstream position, collimation etc. it was a great time. If the dvd is anything like the lesson he gave us that day I will buy it as it would be good to have it to hand just to reference to when needed.

I asked Damian about the orientation of jupiter being "upside down" and he said that it is a tradition amongst planetary imagers that is a nod to the original astronomers (Galileo, messier, etc) who would have seen the planets "upside down" as they did not possess accessories that corrected the image.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[si@nite]

Damian Peach is always going to keep a little mystery to himself where imaging techniques are concerned   & who could blame him that's why he is a world class planetary imager!

[SnakeyJ]

I dipped back in to my DP DVD last night to look at the animation and surface mapping of Winjupos - really useful tutorial. Would be nice to get some decent and consistent data over a couple of nights to try this - a big ask at the mo :-/

[zakkhogan]

I found the DVD helpful. It focuses on processing which helped no end (my before and afters attached)

My only criticism is that there is nothing on the capturing the images in the first place, like focusing, gamma, gain, exposure levels or how many frames to capture (obviously more is better but are we talking 1000 frames, 2000 frames 4000 frames)

but I would recommended it, I defiantly benefitted from watching.

before I watched the dvd

after watching

[JamesF]

Sadly having failed to receive it for Christmas or my birthday despite dropping heavy hints it now appears that the DVD is out of stock

James