Procedure for using REGISTAX for Planetary/Lunar imaging

Hi,
Making images of planets and the moon has been revolutionised over the past few year by a software program call registax, its free and downloaded from
www.astronomie.be/registax/

You make an AVI (video) or a set of BMPs (still pictures) of the planet/moon using typically a webcam (e.g. Philips Toucam Pro) and a telescope and put them through this program where it stacks them to create a single high resolution image. Typically people use between 100-2000+ frames in the AVI or single BMP images for stacking, the more the better.

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 and daunting at first, but after a bit of practice, you'll be able to run through this without even thinking about it as the program is very intuitive and easy to follow. This program likes a fast computer and as much memory as possible, if it runs very slowly on your machine, you might need more memory.
It's best to run through these steps with registax open next to it on the screen.


1, Load up the AVI/bmps into registax.
2, Click "LRGB" if your images are in colour
3, Move the bottom horizontal tool bar (left-right) 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, be it the planet itself or a good crater on the moon. If the centring 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% quality 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, don't manipulate the line manually.
14, Press the "Do All" button, top left.
15, If the image looks bad/destroyed/over-processed, press the "Reset" button and go back to step eleven (warning, if 'reset", the "step incrementer" automatically 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", if the resultant image looks wrong, reset the RGB, press another part of the image and do again, if you cant get a good result, then skip this step.
21, Make sure "automatic" processing is selected

22, 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 (remember the warning in step 15!), 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 (again remembering the warning in step 15!).

23, 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 (step 22) 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. this is a good idea as you might think you have a good image only to come back to it later and see it with fresh eyes and discover it's not quite the image you thought it was.

This is a locked thread, so you cant make posts here, so if you have any questions/comments/suggestions regarding this procedure, make another thread and reference back to these instructions.
There are many people on these broads who have alot experience with registax who'll be willing and able to help.

I had originally locked this thread but in hindsight I think posts here would be good.
If you want to suggest corrections, different settings, alternative ways of doing something in registax, then please post away and I 'll add it to the top tutorial post.