First Attempt

First attempt at imaging.
Using Philips SP900NC Web Camera at prime focus on an ETX125.
Played around with some processing but still haven't a clue what i'm doing yet

Good images Ryan,
Why do you have a darkened area in the middle of the second image.
Are these single frames or did you stack images to get these?

Hi Ryan
For your first image it is very good focus is sharp detale is great. now processing in an art in it's own right . registax v4 is the one to download.
remember practice makes perfect

Hi guys, they are both stacked. but wheter or not it was done correctly is another matter;)
The smaller image had more frames but I don't know where the darkened area came from. It just came out of registax like that when I was playing around with some of the settings.
Just waiting for some clear weather so I can try again.
Thanks for the comments



Another one from the sequence

but whether or not it was done correctly is another matter;)

I've tried to make up a step by step procedure for you on what to do with registax with a typical set of planetary and lunar BMPs ar AVI, it might look abit long winded, but after a bit of practice, you'll be able to run through this without even thinking about it.


1, Load up the AVI/bmps into registax.
2, Click LRGB if your images are in colour
3, Move the lower tool bar to move through the frame sequence to go through all the frames to find a relatively clear one, the best if possible.
4, Click on an obvious and roughly central point in the image, if the centering box goes off screen, registax will discard those frames, make sure you select an alignment box size that suits the image, for toucams 128 works well
5, Click align, let it run, it might take along time.
6, when align is finished, you'll be able to see that say 300 frames are within 95%, and 1000 frames are 80, these are just my figures for a particular AVI, your and everybody elses figures will be different, I always select 95% and then redo the entire process using 75% of the frames.
7, When its done, click on "Limit" and it'll go to the next page.
8, Create a referance frame of 50 by pressing the "create" button.
9, When this is finished, you'll see a bunch of levels slide bars on the left, 1 to 6. If you depress the "1.0" on the upper right of each slide, you'll see the kind of detail that the slider will enhance, you'll see 1 will enhance alot of finer detail+noise and 6 will enhance bigger blobs.
10, Tick the "automatic" processing tick.
11, tick the "wavelet filter" to default (left) and "step increment" to 1
12, Move the slide bars until to enhance real detail, be careful not to go too far.
13, Press the gamma button and set its value from 1.0 to 0.8, type the value, dont manipulate the line.
14, Press the "Do All" button, top left.
15, If the image looks crap, press the "Reset" button and go back to step eleven (warning, if 'reset", the "step incrementer" auto goes to 0, make sure you put it back to 1)
16, when you're happy, press "Continue"

17, Press "optimize and stack"
18, After between anything between 1 and 30 minutes, it'll finish eventually, go make some tea and have some biscuits.
19, Press gamma and set to 1.0 and press the "reset" button.
20, press of the "RGB Balance" button and press "auto balance"
21, make sure "automatic" processing is selected
Now the fun begins

Experiment with the "default" and "gaussian" wavelet settings and different strengths for the 6 sliders. If the image goes AWOL at any time, then press the "reset" button, experiment with different gammas/brightness/contrasts if you want.
Make sure you press the "Do All" button before you go onto the next step, if the image goes AWOL, press the "reset" and redo your levels.
Then click on the "final" tab, change the hue and saturation to add more colour if you want and save the image.

I often then go back to the wavelets setting do a "reset" and retry with different levels , this way you end up with a number of different versions of the same image, and pick the best of the bunch as the nights image.

I hope this helps and ask questions if you don't understand anything above. There are alot of people on the broads who have experience with registax who'll be willing and able to help.

Lovely images Ryan.

Did you use multiple areas in Registax? I noticed an artifact like that dark area before when I used a few alignment areas and Registax had a problem with it for some reason. In fact, this happened to me a few times.

To solve I just restacked with different alignment points until I got one that worked. Hope that works for you.


Trev