AutoStakkert Help

[Holliday]

Hi guys, I've not had much luck stacking my solar files from today. 

This is what they seem to come out like:

And this is from a single .bmp from the .mts movie file:

The original movies aren't tracked so there is some jumping about when I use the go-to manually to re-align the sun but nothing out of frame or anything. I assume it's either a problem with choosing alignment points on AutoStakkert or the fact it's neither full disc nor close surface. 

Any advice would be great, cheers!

[D4N]

I would suggest pre-processing the .mts file in PIPP first, this will get rid of the jumps and make it a lot easier for AS!2 to do its job.

[Holliday]

5 minutes ago, D4N said:

I would suggest pre-processing the .mts file in PIPP first, this will get rid of the jumps and make it a lot easier for AS!2 to do its job.

I should have mentioned I already run it through PiPP as neither AS! nor Registax seem to like the .mts file type.

I've tried carious PiPP processing options as well including the 'optimise' options, but again due to I assume the sensor size of my camera and the scope I can't really get a full disc in view when recording thus I'm left with neither a close-up or a full-disc. Also with the AFB setting turned on generally it returns a 'FAILED' error, or it get's rid of every frame except the first.

[Steve Ward]

If the camera cannot capture a full disc you will need to use the "Frame Stabilisation" section in PIPP too.

In the"Processing" section you will need to select "Surface Feature" , tick the "Enable Surface Stabilisation" , "Reject frames without anchor feature" , "Enable Area of Interest" , "Reject frames without complete area of interest" and"Crop frames to area of interest" boxes underneath (see the screenshot below)

Now hit the "Test Options" box top right and a preview shot will appear , drag the Blue box to enlarge it and cover a decent part of the frame and then drag the Red box over the Sunspot in frame and enlarge it to just cover the region (second s'shot example)

PIPP will now go through the movie and save only those frames that have the full Blue box in shot , crop the frames to that Blue box and stabilise the output around the selected feature in the Red box .... all being well ...

[Holliday]

Cheers for the replies so far,

Just tried running PiPP with AFB and AOI and it completes with only one frame exported and the rest rejected.

I've ordered a cheap focal reducer so hopefully I won't have this issue in the future and can just do full disc processing.

[Steve Ward]

Try reducing the size of the blue box , if it's too big in a really jittery video then PIPP will reject frames that even slightly fall outside the parameters.

[cgarry]

When PIPP runs it should give a summary of why the frames were discarded.  In this case it will be either because the AFB was not found or the complete AOI was not present.

I would choose the smallest AFB possible on the little group of sunspots.  When the AFB is searched for, it is done in 2 stages, firstly with a massively reduced version of the image to get a rough estimate of the AFB location and then a limited search on the full sized version of the image is performed to get the exact position.  It is done this way because otherwise it will take several hundred times longer to process.  In the reduced size phase the AFB is reduced to a 16x16 pixel block.

If you select a large AFB around a small feature then that feature basically disappears when the AFB is reduced to be 16x16 pixels for the first stage of the AFB searching.

Another approach is to put the AFB on the limb of the disc, say at the half-past-one position.  This gives PIPP some contrast to work with and it should perform better unless that part of the limb is going off frame.

Cheers,
Chris

[Holliday]

I tried the above and it still wasn't aligning the image correctly, or just ended up with a very cropped image.

So this lunch I went back out and instead of capturing .mts files I just used a remote shutter and captured single image files (this results in the whole disc being seen). Ended up stacking 60 or so, ran it through PiPP on the planetary preset, then AS and finally processed the resulting .tiff in Registax6. Ended up with: 

So just need to wait for my focal reducer now and should be able to return to .mts movie files and see the full disc which apparently solves my stacking/aligning issue.

Thanks for the help/info by the way!