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Goodbye Registax hello AviStack + ICE! 47 pane mosaic

teh_orph

By teh_orph
in Imaging - Lunar

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teh_orph

teh_orph

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Hello guys,

After last week's mosaic I've learnt some more things from the folks on here. This time I've changed my technique a little bit to use iMerge in the field (per jgs001's suggestion) to ensure I don't miss bits like last time. However I got a bit overzealous and took ever more videos! One significant issue with using iMerge though was that some of my images were hard to merge/were a bit wonky maybe and hand aligning them over the space of an hour meant that my temporary moon was not circular! Uh-oh, does that mean there are huge holes?? So I grabbed a few more random shots just in case before my laptop battery died.

To add to the fun whilst outside (I live on a main road) some louts got into a fight literally feet from me and I had to hide behind a wall whilst they did their thing, hoping that they wouldn't see my expensive kit!

Anyway - 47 panes of ~1000 franes each shot with a Skywatcher Explorer 130P, RA drive, £6 SPC 880 (with mod). Stacked using the batch function in AviStack (not 'batch' enough for my liking tbh), merged with MS ICE after AndyUK's suggestion and post processing PS CS3. Seeing was not very good so I was very careful to only take the best frames during stacking.

moonsmall.jpg

Please click for the larger image.

Comments?

Thanks for looking :)

Simon

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teh_orph

teh_orph

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Thanks for the kind comments guys, I'm glad you all like it. I don't know why but I much prefer the image when flipped horizontally (the way it came out of the stacking process). Somehow it looked just better! But instead I've shown it the way you'd see it in the sky. Anyway...

Very nice, what time were you up to to get that?:)

About 11:30-12:30. Cold :mad:

(I think you are right an hour would cause problems with aligning the panes)

Why is that? It's on a German equatorial mount so I figured the image would look similar over this period of time, right? I guess libration-like effects would need a longer time? But I think the seeing def changed over the hour. It was much better towards the end...when I was photographing the boring full-bright part of the moon!

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AndyUK

AndyUK

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Hi Simon - That really is excellent...! I'm not sure if I mentioned, but ICE doesn't always work (for me) but when it does it works really well (and is a lot simpler/quicker than imerge!). Now try a mosaic using a barlow... (but get a bigger HDD first :))

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teh_orph

teh_orph

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Hi Simon - That really is excellent...! I'm not sure if I mentioned, but ICE doesn't always work (for me) but when it does it works really well (and is a lot simpler/quicker than imerge!). Now try a mosaic using a barlow... (but get a bigger HDD first :))

Yeah Andy I remember you saying that - what kind of result do you get? And also did you try using the other solvers (selectable from the bottom left corner after the first result). I think the planar ones are suited to what we'd photograph.

I didn't like the lack of control in ICE. There's no feedback either to tell you what you've missed, what's well defined, no manual pane movement. And it's supposed to be multi-core which I didn't see!

Did you manage to stack your images in iMerge instead?

Oh and cheers for the kind comments again guys. I think in future I'm going to invest in a better barlow (this was with the stock 2x model) and perhaps also use a UV/IR cut filter to see if that improves the focus at all. FLO wins again :mad:

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AndyUK

AndyUK

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Yeah Andy I remember you saying that - what kind of result do you get? And also did you try using the other solvers (selectable from the bottom left corner after the first result). I think the planar ones are suited to what we'd photograph.

I didn't like the lack of control in ICE. There's no feedback either to tell you what you've missed, what's well defined, no manual pane movement. And it's supposed to be multi-core which I didn't see!

Did you manage to stack your images in iMerge instead?

Basically, out of the 70 odd panes I took, it stitched c. 70% correctly, but then had a hiccup with the rest - Some were simply wrong and the others were unresolved (yet I was able to resolve them manually in imerge)... I also discovered that I could create 3 separate 1/3 mosaics in ICE, but then I couldn't stitch those together... and I also discovered (I think) that although Winodws 7 is happy having AVI's dragged into imerge, imerge doesn't like Windows 7 with bmp's or tif's...

In addition, my laptop received a windows update whilst I was on the run and microsoft decided that a reboot was more important than what I was doing after I'd taken about 70% :).

However, the stitching hiccup occurred after about the 19th pane, but as a consequence of having to reboot and re-set up the exposure again, I then realised I hadn't made a note of settings and later I discovered that the last 20 panes were slightly different... and to cap it all, when trying the manual imerge method, I then discovered that even though I'd used the imerge "AVI drag&drop" method to check I wasn't leaving any holes... I still did :D. It's all in this thread http://stargazerslounge.com/imaging-image-processing-help-techniques/118024-help-ms-ice-imerge.html#post1568448

Given the holes and the differing exposures, I abandoned that mosaic - There'll always be another night... :mad:

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jgs001

jgs001

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Good one Simon. The raw, unprocessed AVI's often don't seem to align properly in iMerge, but once processed, I've not had an issue. Even shooting over 2 or 3 hours with the image alignment. The changing conditions can play merry hell over that time frame though.

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bus_ter

bus_ter

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Exceptional image from the webcam. You've put my SLR efforts to shame. I've never thought of doing something like that with the webcam. So much work to build an image that size from 640x480 images. The final processing is also top notch.

Are you on Flickr? I run the SPC900NC group and this image would really show the other members what the webcam is capable of!

http://www.flickr.com/groups/SPC900NC/

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teh_orph

teh_orph

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Cheers again guys - I've wanted to get another image on the go to show the progression of the moon over the cycle but it's been cloudy every night since the 28th :eek:

That hasn't stopped me shopping though. New barlow on it's way along with a bunch of filters. Hopefully my next pics will be a bit better!

Oh and I was interested to see why my in-the-field iMerge didn't work out, so I realigned the original AVIs to see if the camera had rotated...and the image came out fine! I guess I must have just done it too quickly...

<flickr group>

I haven't used flickr in years - hopefully my account is still active! How do I supply my image for your group?

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dmahon

dmahon

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A 47 pane mosaic, wow.

It only takes 4 panes (with a lot of overlap too) to get a full image shot of the moon with my ED80 - fortunately Photoshop stacks them all automatically with no messing about on my part. I didn't think the focal length of a 130P was that much longer than my ED80 - were you using a Barlow?

Anyway, here is my much more meagre effort of the moon (only my second attemt at anything, after a rather poor Jupiter). I still have lots to learn about Rgistack though and I hope that I can improve it significantly when I learn what I am doing!

Moon%2024_10_2010%20Merge%2002.jpg

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