Microsoft ICE troubles

[Marky1973]

I have read a lot about Microsoft ICE and how easy it is to use...not for me...!

I had a first go at a Lunar Mosaic the other night and took 6 AVI files with my ZWO camera. Processed in PIPP, stacked in Autostakkert, Wavelets in Registax and then into ICE

 

I've played around with the settings a lot and it always seem to come back with a small piece missing in the bottom right

 

Is there something obvious I am doing wrong? Do I have too much overlap with my images? Would that confuse the programme if there is too much overlap? Seems to have worked perfectly everywhere else.

There shouldn't be any gaps from what I can see from the first image, but perhaps there is just too much to cope with?

Cheers

Mark

[Davey-T]

Never had much success with MICE on solar stuff, silly suggestion maybe but have you tried turning it up the other way before stitching to see if the missing bit moves ?

Bigger overlaps seem to work better than small ones

Dave

[Marky1973]

Cheers, Dave. Will have a play with that later....out and about for most of the day now...swimming (kids), lunch and cinema!

Thanks,

Mark

[John78]

ICE is pathetic, sure its fast, but its really poor at stitching things properly.  Hugin is sloooooow, hugin is gooooooooood.

[Marky1973]

Thanks John. Wasn't aware of Hugin....just started last night with ICE and iMerge (which I didn't get on with at all)....so will try Hugin to compare. 

Slow is fine... It'll give me time to make a cup of tea, or drool over picture of telescopes I want....

[toxic]

ice is great but only stitch 2 at a time then stitch the stitched files together works great even doing it this way is way quicker and no it even seems to even out a slightly darker background to that with a lighter background and save as tiff

 

[Marky1973]

Thanks, Chris - I will try that as well. I think I have realised part of the error of my ways though - I need to be a bit more careful with cropping my stacked images from Autostakkert as they are now working a lot better now they are tidier.... he said with a very red face.....

[David Smith]

I've never managed to get anything recognisable from Hugin. MSICE can be a bit twitchy at times, if it won't stitch using "Simple Panorama" then your in for a rough ride. I usually find this occurs when I have a lot of overlap between my frames. I've recently started using Autostitch (as recommended on here) and find this tends to succeed where MSICE falls short.

[Marky1973]

Thanks Dave, will have a look at that one as well - always good to have a variety of tools! Since I tidied up the edges of my images, ICE seems to have worked pretty well....can't believe I was being so dense....well, actually I can.....

I'll post the results in the Beginner's section....

[Uranium235]

lol.... it happens to us all mate

I was going to just say "crop the images", but youve already figured it out.

[Marky1973]

Ha, yeah.... I get there eventually, but always happy to make myself look stupid in public on the way, Rob! ;-)