[ASTRO] Help with Registax

Hi people,
I was out at sea last week (got back last night) and managed to get
several photos of the Mercury maximum elongation on my cameraphone
without triggering the alarms in the radio room. (I cheated and made
sure that I switched my phone on while I knew that the wireless
operator was in the galley, so the medic would have been on station,
and he's not a trained W.O.)
By naked eye Mercury was clearly visible. And in each frame I actually
targeted to keep Venus in shot, with the expectation that I'd need to
stack the images. Indeed, even through the JPEG distortions I'm pretty
sure that I can see Mercury in at least 2 of the frames. So I should
increase the signal-noise ratio by stacking (at least for Venus and
Mercury - the quite pretty cloudscapes will get blurred to some degree,
but I can live with that.
But now I'm having a job to get Registax to actually stack the images.
Obviously I'm not understanding something, but equally obviously I'm
not understanding what I'm not understanding.

Does anyone have any practical experience with Registax who can give me
a hand?
Or for that matter, is there an alternative for this task. I'm pretty
sure that Registax is the most well-known solution, but there may be
others I'm not aware of.

--
Aidan Karley, FGS
Aberdeen, Scotland
Written at Wed, 14 Feb 2007 09:04 GMT, but posted later.

I like this one over Registax:
http://www.pk3.org/Astro/index.htm?k3ccdtools.htm
Free download for 30 days.

Scott
"Aidan Karley" wrote in message
.. .
Hi people,
I was out at sea last week (got back last night) and managed to get
several photos of the Mercury maximum elongation on my cameraphone
without triggering the alarms in the radio room. (I cheated and made
sure that I switched my phone on while I knew that the wireless
operator was in the galley, so the medic would have been on station,
and he's not a trained W.O.)
By naked eye Mercury was clearly visible. And in each frame I actually
targeted to keep Venus in shot, with the expectation that I'd need to
stack the images. Indeed, even through the JPEG distortions I'm pretty
sure that I can see Mercury in at least 2 of the frames. So I should
increase the signal-noise ratio by stacking (at least for Venus and
Mercury - the quite pretty cloudscapes will get blurred to some degree,
but I can live with that.
But now I'm having a job to get Registax to actually stack the images.
Obviously I'm not understanding something, but equally obviously I'm
not understanding what I'm not understanding.

Does anyone have any practical experience with Registax who can give me
a hand?
Or for that matter, is there an alternative for this task. I'm pretty
sure that Registax is the most well-known solution, but there may be
others I'm not aware of.

--
Aidan Karley, FGS
Aberdeen, Scotland
Written at Wed, 14 Feb 2007 09:04 GMT, but posted later.

Aidan Karley wrote:
Hi people,
I was out at sea last week (got back last night) and managed to get
several photos of the Mercury maximum elongation on my cameraphone
without triggering the alarms in the radio room. (I cheated and made
sure that I switched my phone on while I knew that the wireless
operator was in the galley, so the medic would have been on station,
and he's not a trained W.O.)
By naked eye Mercury was clearly visible. And in each frame I actually
targeted to keep Venus in shot, with the expectation that I'd need to
stack the images. Indeed, even through the JPEG distortions I'm pretty
sure that I can see Mercury in at least 2 of the frames. So I should
increase the signal-noise ratio by stacking (at least for Venus and
Mercury - the quite pretty cloudscapes will get blurred to some degree,
but I can live with that.
But now I'm having a job to get Registax to actually stack the images.
Obviously I'm not understanding something, but equally obviously I'm
not understanding what I'm not understanding.

Does anyone have any practical experience with Registax who can give me
a hand?
Or for that matter, is there an alternative for this task. I'm pretty
sure that Registax is the most well-known solution, but there may be
others I'm not aware of.

It sounds like the only "star" you have on those photos is Venus that
stands out well enough for it to use for stacking. It will need two for
stacking as I doubt on a ship you could hold the camera steady enough
for a one point alignment. Without at least two points no program can
align those images. You may have better luck manually stacking in an
image program that allows this. By using the sea and venus you might be
able to get something.

Rick
--
Correct domain name is arvig and it is net not com. Prefix is correct.
Third character is a zero rather than a capital "Oh".

what the?
trial version, nah...
I am a astronut, I am poor. After buy all these eyepieces and stuff...

In article , Rick Johnson
wrote:
You may have better luck manually stacking in an
image program that allows this.

Got any how-to for GIMP or IrfanView?
(I suppose the process ought to be generic enough to work on any
image editing program above a certain level of competence, so a how-to
for any program ought to do.)

It will need two for
stacking as I doubt on a ship you could hold the camera steady enough
for a one point alignment.

More of an issue is that the camera phone doesn't have a bracket
for attaching to a tripod, and I hadn't got a tripod anyway. The sea was
quite stable enough at the time.

Is how-to a countable or an uncountable noun? "How-tos" as a
plural sounds like rules for a dwarf-tossing competition.

--
Aidan Karley, FGS
Aberdeen, Scotland
Written at Fri, 16 Feb 2007 09:52 GMT, but posted later.

Aidan Karley wrote:



Got any how-to for GIMP or IrfanView?
(I suppose the process ought to be generic enough to work on ny
image editing program above a certain level of competence, so a how-to
for any program ought to do.)

For stacking IrfanView won't work. I know nothing on GIMP. Search the
net for how to artiles on Registax. I've seen several. You really need
both. For some things one is better than the other.
http://members.cox.net/t.jensen/registax.html


I've had Registax work better for aligning and stacking planet shots
hand held through the scope. For stacking those where the camera was
rigidly mounted K3CCDtools did a much better job for me. But when
working with one point source and a hint of another I'm not sure
anything will work very well. Just not enough information to go on.
The shortest distance from Venus to ocean may work if it was quite calm
or to some land object if any. With Registax 4 you can select things
like that for it to align on but a sea horizon is likely beyond its
abilities.

For stacking to work you really need as many shots as possible. If all
are equal the improvement can be as high as the square root of the
number of frames. So going from 1 to 2 frames will improve things up to
41%. Going from 2 to 8 frames could double the image quality of two
frames, etc. You see you need many frames when trying to pull Mercury
out of the gunk, two or three aren't going to help a lot. The two
programs I mentioned can scan all images find those that will help and
discard those that won't. A web cam is what most use for this, not a
cell phone as they normally don't have the memory to hold several dozen
shots.

Manual stacking with an image processing program requires one that will
handle layers. Do don't think IrfanView does. I don't know about Gimp.
Photoshop does as well as the less expensive Elements. But working
with a few dozen layers and aligning them doesn't sound like anything
I'd want to try. I find it difficult enough manually aligning three
color and one luminosity layer manually. I prefer to let the software
do it if possible.


Rick
--
Correct domain name is arvig and it is net not com. Prefix is correct.
Third character is a zero rather than a capital "Oh".

In article ,
Rick Johnson wrote:

snip

Manual stacking with an image processing program requires one that will
handle layers. Do don't think IrfanView does. I don't know about Gimp.
Photoshop does as well as the less expensive Elements. [...]

The GIMP has layers, more or less like Photoshop's (but no adjustment
layers).

--
Odysseus