First go at Registax5

I made my first attempt at a stacking lunar images in Registax5 during our latest and very fabulous full moon. I've got to say, I've never come so close to putting my fist through the monitor but after hours of tutorials and trial and error I finally came out the other end with a result that I was happy with.



I did some sharpening, contrast and saturation fiddling in Photoshop. I still don't think I really understand wavelets in Registax5 though. Maybe someone could point me in the direction of a thread/tutorial?

Will

That's a super image, crisp details, excellent exposure and contrast, and nice colour. Well done.

My experience of wavelets is limited, but their use seems to be a 'black art'. I just mess around to see what works for that particular image.

Mike

Wow, that's sharp! I like the colouration.

Registax 6 seems to have streamlined much of the processing, you should try it out.

With the wavelets I usually find that 'less is more' but since they're mathematically derived it can often seem like (as mykc says) deep magic is involved. I'm sure you've discovered that it's so easy to overdo it and get a very artificial image. Also, whilst you obviously have a decent series of images or video to work from, it's quite possible to fool oneself into thinking that it's going to get miracles from 'mush'; I've had more than a few nights of planetary imaging in the city that, whilst instructional, resulted in raw images I just couldn't get anything worthwhile from.

Will

That's a good full-moon image.
Full moons are challenging as lack of shadows tend to loose texture.
But I feel that you've done well there. Focus is good and you have captured detail.
Wavelets are a black art and I can't fault your result. I believe the "less is more" does often apply to any enhancement process and feel you have found a very acceptable balance.

I think I've said it before - the moon is underestimated as an imaging target and I'm always appreciative of seeing lunar images.

Mark C.

Hi Will,

That is a first class photo. Great focus and processing also great detail top draw imaging keep it up.

Well done.

Thank you all.

It did come out nice and sharp. A few of the frames were slightly out of focus but it seems the ones that were in focus compensated for it just enough.

I did find that when editing the wavelets (whatever they are), it was only on a couple of frames with very tiny increments. Too much and the image would become very noisy.

Also a quick tip, I found that auto balancing the RGB channels within Registax before the final stack and then adding a bit of saturation in Photoshop gave a much more subtle and natural looking result. This also helped in keeping the chromatic aberration to a minimum as my telescope is an achromat.