PS3 Eye - Copernicus and Eratosthenes

[furrysocks2]

A month to the day since my last lunar imaging - I didn't have the patience tonight to do another terminator mosaic so had a quick peek at 86x and picked out a region that looked interesting.

I tried the 5MP (2fps!) microscope camera but it didn't seem to register so I used the PS3 Eye camera again - 640x480 @ 75fps.

Standard procedure - rotate camera so ROI drifts horizontally, then quick-captured 1000 frames - ROI covered 60% or so of the FOV - push back to the start and take capture again. I ended up with 13000 frames from PIPP with a silly-small 272x312 ROI, AS!2 10% sharpened.

Silly-small!

So back round again instead with a massive 412x427 ROI - 10% of 10000 frames:

That's a (little) bit more like it.

 

I found a new way to focus though... off to the fully lit, over-exposed limb and play with focus until the glow on the edge is minimal, then back to ROI and image. Seemed to work... I'd first focused normally, while viewing the ROI, and took a few videos, then focused on the limb-glow and carried on imaging. If the gray trace is showing time, and if PIPP assembled the output AVI in order of the input videos, then I can see here a step-change in the average quality...

 

[furrysocks2]

I tried a 1.5x drizzle, conv 10% raw blend, GIMP'd a subtle unsharp mask and tweaked levels a touch.

[furrysocks2]

I saw ImPPG mentioned by michael.h.g.wilkinson in another thread, so I downloaded it and fat-fingered the unsharpened version of the image in the last post to pretty reasonable effect, I think:

Side by side:

 

For reference/criticism:

• Lucy-Richardson deconvolution - Sigma 1.88, iterations 500, prevent ringing checked
• Unsharp masking - Sigma 25, Amount 1.4
• Tone curve - stretch, smooth, gamma 0.65

 

I might go back and revisit some other images having seen the difference here.

[Sierra Golf Mike]

I downloaded and installed IMPPG last night and had a play, I didn't use figures as high as yours which only yielded subtle changes. I must have another go tonight!

[furrysocks2]

19 minutes ago, Sierra Golf Mike said:

I downloaded and installed IMPPG last night and had a play, I didn't use figures as high as yours which only yielded subtle changes. I must have another go tonight!

I can't believe the difference! I've never got on well with Registax and favoured the simplicity of letting AS!2 do what it does. ImPPG was new to me until last night, but my latest image is so much nicer to look at imo. I always had the impression that the output of AS!2 was a bit blurry or over-processed, few subtle variations in tone, a bit stark.

For a 57% crop of 640x480, I'm really pleased with last night's image. I think I worked out that I'm oversampling, that plus drifting across the FOV, I believe drizzling in AS!2 is a good thing, if nothing else I get a better image size given the small ROI/crop size. A subtle unsharp mask in gimp (below, on the right) I think tops it off, the one on the right out of ImPPG was stell feeling a little soft to me. Resolution though is about 1km/px.

Looking forward to playing with ImPPG again on some of my older data.

 

Good luck with it!