Registax, the Moon and RAW stills?

[Sierra Golf Mike]

I thought I would try to stack a few pics of the moon in registax for a bit of practice. The attached one is only of 4 shots taken pretty much one after the other. My understanding was that Registax would be able to match the images from the align reference square. As you can see the image is well out. Any ideas as to where I am going wrong?

[brianb]

There is a skill in picking the alignment area in Registax ... try a larger one try picking an area that you can see is obviously different to the areas around it, try picking a sharper subframe. If the misregistration on the originals is gross you may have to change the search radius, or resort to manual alignment (where you click on the alignment features in each frame).

[pook]

I installed Registax last night..... Hmmm...

Looks very unintuitive, and I'll have to spend some time with the manual when I get a chance.

I have the same problem too. Trying to align just 4 images... it fails totally, no matter how many alignment points I add. How annoying this software is. Each time it fails to align you assume it needs more point, and after spending 30 minutes adding point, still fails.

Also.. I hate programs that don't put an entry into the start menu! It only uses one CPU core for processing, so it's slow as well. Sloppy coding.. not impressed. The irony is.. the only thing it did add to my start menu... was the uninstall option.. which I will probably make use of.

[EDIT]

If I see this....

...one more time, I'll scream.

[Sierra Golf Mike]

When I got that message I did it again with 4 frames got the message again and manually selected and got a decent result see here. I think it may have been sheer luck because I have tried again and can't seem to recreate it. Any help out there would be much appreciated.

Cheers

[pook]

That's it.. had enough.

Core i7 (X58) running at 4.2GHz.

12GB DDR3 1600 RAM

1TB spinpoint F3 (80% free) for OS partition

2TB Spinpoint F3 just for scratch disk use (currently empty)

12TB of free disk space on a RAID10 server.

Not enough storage space available? It was only trying to stack 4 RAW files.

Either this thing is just not liking a 64bit OS, or it's rubbish. Can't decide which. Either way, it's unusable for me.

Any other software that actually works?

[pook]

Nope.. been messing with this all day. I just can't get it to work. When it does go through the whole process without throwing up an error, the images are not aligned. More often than not though, it's telling me I have run out of storage space.

Can anyone shed any light on this?

[dmahon]

I've never asked it to stack .raw files - I give it a 1-2 GB .avi of a thousand or more frames from a webcam and it always manages to align them just fine (Windows 7 64 bit).

[pook]

Maybe it's a RAW file problem then. There's no reason I need to use RAW files.. I was just hooting in RAW. I can batch them to TIFF and see what it makes of that then.##

[Grim Fandango]

Hi

You have exactly the same setup as i do, i think my AVI's end up as BMP's of JPEG try that see if it works. Are you using a webcam ?

[Zakalwe]

Why do you want to stack such a few images, and at that scale? Stacking is used to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (in DSO work) or to help eliminate the effects of atmospheric turbulence in highly magnified images. What is it you are trying to achieve?

Use Deep Sky Stacker to stack RAW camera files (though if you think Registax is unintuitive.....). Registax is normally used to stack the frames of an .avi to improve the signal-to-noise ratio.

The learning curves for both programs are, IMHO, very steep. Have a look through the primers in the imaging section, tough even with those I struggle to find out what I am doing (hence, my signature!)

[dph1nm]

Use Deep Sky Stacker to stack RAW camera files

I don't think DSS will stack moon shots - you need at least 8 stars for it to work.

NigelM

[Zakalwe]

I don't think DSS will stack moon shots - you need at least 8 stars for it to work.

NigelM

I didn't know that:icon_salut:

[pook]

Why do you want to stack such a few images, and at that scale? Stacking is used to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (in DSO work) or to help eliminate the effects of atmospheric turbulence in highly magnified images. What is it you are trying to achieve?

Just to get used to the program. I wasn't stacking them to improve the images per say... just practising with the software.

Fair point. I'll wait until I have some DSO images to work with.

That still doesn't explain why it spits it's dummy out at only 5 RAW files and tells me I have no storage space though. Even when I start creating DSO images I'll be using large files as a web cam will probably not give a wide enough field.

[Zakalwe]

Just to get used to the program. I wasn't stacking them to improve the images per say... just practising with the software.

Fair point. I'll wait until I have some DSO images to work with.

That still doesn't explain why it spits it's dummy out at only 5 RAW files and tells me I have no storage space though. Even when I start creating DSO images I'll be using large files as a web cam will probably not give a wide enough field.

Agreed, but for DSO you will probably use DSS to stack.

The alignment issue that you were getting is (I guess) because the alignment point are not distinct enough, so Registax is jumping about. You could manually align the points in each frame which would solve it.

Ultimately though, I think you are using the wrong tool for the wrong job, and getting frustrated. Have you tried stacking some .avi files in Registax to have a play at that?

[pook]

No, not yet.

I think you're right. Maybe DSS is where I need to be looking.

[Sierra Golf Mike]

Bit of a hijack guys, but don't worry about it as long as it helps someone. I have managed to stack 4 or 5 RAW images but in general terms, I don't think Registax likes them. I've had a couple of reasonable results though. Here and Here, the second is only 2 images stacked despite trying 7 and I don't know why it only stacked the 2.

[SniffTheGlove]

I know this is an old thread but I have been having this problem and I have contacted Cor who helped me.

The reasons could be...

To many alignment points

To much movement between the frames of the target

I was trying to stack 100 moon shots from a EOS350D at full-resolution 3456x2304

Now the moon in these shots slowly moves from top right of the frame to the bottom left of the frame (my tracking motor on my EQ Platform not that accurate over 10mins).

Putting these into Registax V6.1.0.8 and clicking "Set Alignpoints" to auto select the points produced 1799 points and then going to Stack produce the ghosting of the images.

If I even went to stacking of just 2 images then the same happened.

I tried resizing the images to 1024x683px and ran it through Registax and these worked out fine as when it came to auto selecting alignment points it only came up with 179 due to the smaller image size.

I contacted Cor asking if this was me doing something wrong or not.

Cor tried the images I sent to him and it took several goes for him to work out what was going wrong. It was too many align points and the movement of the target in the images was to great for Registax to cope with but he found out that if you manually select a few defined alignment points and also select Align by CofG it work out OK and produce a decent image.

Hope this helps anyone else getting ghosting images

is that there is usually to many alignpoints

[Sierra Golf Mike]

Sean,

Thanks for that, have done any imaging for a while it's a winter activity for me. Will be starting again soon. Must upgrade my Registax though.

Cheers

Steve