Processing The Moon

[Mikey0368]

I took images of the moon last night at different ISO and exposure settings but I'm not having much luck with processing. I used APT's Planetary feature and I have 1000 frames at each setting so I can either use a single image or stack them. The basic image looks ok but I'm sure I can get more out of it.

I have StarTools, GIMP and Registax available to me but I'm not sure which processing features in particular I should be focussing on. Can anyone give me some pointers please?

Thanks.

[vlaiv]

Here is what I would do:

- pick shortest exposure time with highest ISO setting. It might not look the best as single sub, but when doing planetary imaging that is what you want to do - go with shortest exposure to freeze the seeing and use highest ISO (gain on planetary cams) as that provides the least amount of read noise.

- use PIPP to pre process your images. Hopefully you shot them as raw images rather than .jpegs or similar. PIPP will do debayering for you and save them as 16 bit color png files

- Download Autostakkert! 3 and load images in it and stack them - works pretty much the same as Registax - you assign anchor points, analyze frames, select number of frames to be stacked based on their quality and stack

- Load resulting stack into Registax for wavelet sharpening

- Load result of sharpening into Gimp for final touch ups

 

[Mikey0368]

Cheers, I'll give that a go. Unfortunately they're jpeg files so I'll need to check my settings next time, I was expecting raw images as that's what I usually get from APT but presumably I have to reset it when using Planetary.

I'll put that one down to experience!

[Guest]

Quote

 

I found this youtube video useful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYLz7mxGHTg

 

[vlaiv]

2 hours ago, Mikey0368 said:

Cheers, I'll give that a go. Unfortunately they're jpeg files so I'll need to check my settings next time, I was expecting raw images as that's what I usually get from APT but presumably I have to reset it when using Planetary.

I'll put that one down to experience!

You can still try with jpegs, but results will not be as good due to lossy nature of jpeg compression algorithm and the fact that it records data in 8bit format.