First image of Saturn

All the labeled pics from the last night were 5 minute 3000 frame avi's. I ran them through virtualdub and deleted all the frames with obvious bad seeing and were Saturn bounced around and then converted them to bmp's. Then I ran the BMP's through PPMCenter that grades, sorts, centers and crops. These bmps were then fed into registax.

I thought from reading Dave Lilis' tutorial that one should limit to 85-95%. When I did this I would be left with between 500-800 @ 85% for example or if I set it at 95% quality it would leave me with about 50 to stack. No where near 2000 frames? Aiming to stack 1500-2000 frames, is that only when I know the seeing has been exceptional??

Nice work Keith - looks like you've got the bug now

You do realise this is now going to cost you money, and you may give up looking through your scope entirely :shock:

Guys, I've been wondering about Mike Salways article on ICEINSPACE specifically about how splitting your coloured bitmaps into their 3 colour components can mean that registax does a much better job of aligning and stacking and also enables separate wavelet tweaking on each colour before recombining.

Its just that I wonder do I have better data than I think but its just registax not doing a great job because my colour elements are skewed due to my cheap barlows.

However, all the software referenced in the artical is free except the astroimage for recombilation (is that de-interlacing?) and for recominging the RGB elements. The artical was written in '06 I think though. Can anyone recomend software for recombining and aligning the RGB elements with pixel perfext X,Y alignment?

I thought from reading Dave Lilis' tutorial that one should limit to 85-95%. When I did this I would be left with between 500-800 @ 85% for example or if I set it at 95% quality it would leave me with about 50 to stack. No where near 2000 frames? Aiming to stack 1500-2000 frames, is that only when I know the seeing has been exceptional??

Hi Keith,
The figures I give in the tutorial are only guidelines, if you find that 85% gives you a small number of frames to work with, then you'll have to increase the frame count to between 1500-200 frames and see what it gives you, registax is all about experimenting. I have found the RGB splitting does increase the image detail but it also triples your workload.

Mike Salways tutorial is exceptional !!, I would consider virtualdob and ppmcenter as almost mandatory at this stage and will probabily include them in the tutorial. The problem I have with the RBG splitting is that I don't see a cost free way of recombining them, I use photoshop but not everyone has it. Photoshop can recombine them, I use the layers function for this.

Astraimage looks like it does wonders, I might buy it unless someone can come up with an alternative.