Greetings!
Another night that looked promising, what with -7C before 7pm, and skies that looked clear.
One hour, 16 imaging runs of Jupiter and a final temp of -15C later I shut everything down and tried out a new processing method.
*instead* of running all 16 imaging runs (abut 70GB) through autostakkert at 5%, 10%, and 25%, then bringing in each of the 16*3=48 images into Registax and doing wavelets on them, and then bringing in one of the 5,10, or 25% runs into GIMP to do three operations of black point, colour saturation and unsharp mask, and then onto ImageMagick for annotation, I tried the new method. It came to me from one of the so many online video tutorials that I have watched in the last month that I can’t even remember where it came from! The above method can take hours (sometimes a few, sometimes 10), especially running through autostakkert.
This time I took the 16 runs, put them in autostakkert at 10% and turned on the “sharpened” option. This does a much poorer job then Registax, but is batchable and automatic. This took mere minutes. I then looked at the sharpened “draft” results and chose only the best few. Those “chosen ones” went back into autostakkert with sharpened turned off, and the best 5%, 10% and 25% turned on. Then onto Registax, Gimp and Imagemagick as before.
This best result shows that seeing was poor, if not very poor. The raw video shows Jupiter bouncing around left, right, up and down. Firecapture ROI and Cutout Box options can minimize those motions but cannot compensate for the “Z-axis” of in and out movement. The result is a fairly poor contrast, low resolution image of Jupiter.
I do however, love the new, shortened processing method. Instead of results tomorrow, they are available today!