7-panel lunar mosaic captured 5th May 2025 with 60% waxing moon at 45° elevation.
- stitch_gimp_scaled.jpg (908.01 KiB) Viewed 2746 times
Endymion/Atlas/Hercules captured 2nd May 2025 with 30% waxing moon at 55° elevation.
- tiled-decon_denoise_crop.png (748.74 KiB) Viewed 2746 times
7-panel Mosaic
Hardware: Celestron C8 SCT, Celestron AVX mount, Altair 183M, UV/IR-cut/L filter in manual filter wheel, JMI motorised focuser.
Software: SharpCap 4.1, Autostakkert 4, Microsoft Image Composite Editor, BiggSky (deconvolution) and GIMP.
Capture: SER, MONO8, black_level=0, gain=250, exposure=5ms, capture area 5440x3648 , frames=500 @ 5fps
Endymion/Atlas/Hercules
Hardware: Celestron C8 SCT, Celestron AVX mount, Altair 183C, UV/IR-cut/L filter in manual filter wheel, JMI motorised focuser.
Software: SharpCap 4.1, Autostakkert 4, BiggSky (deconvolution).
Capture: SER, RAW8, black_level=0, gain=200, exposure=31.5ms, capture area 1024x768 (to increase fps), frames=2000 @ 31fps
Processing Mosaic
Autostakkert!4: (for each panel) stack best 50% of 500 frames, AP size=200, no drizzle or resampling or sharpening (because that is what the documentation recommends).
BiggSky: All 7 panels loaded, deconvolution (PSF from ROI), not tiled, no denoise, exported to TIFF.
Microsoft Image Composite Editor: stitch 7 panels.
GIMP: rotate 90°, Levels, Noise Reduction (amount=1), Unsharp Mask (amount=500), Contrast=10, Curves to lighten, scaled to 40% to meet forum file size limit.
I elected not to apply denosie in BiggSky, as being a mosaic the image gets compressed anyway.
Processing Endymion
Autostakkert!4: stack best 50% of 2000 frames, AP size=200, no drizzle or resampling or sharpening (because that is what the BiggSky documentation recommends).
BiggSky: Deconvolution (PSF from ROI), tiled, 100% denoise before and after, crop, exported to TIFF.
** No further processing on the BiggSky TIFF output.
[Note: deconvolution runtimes - tiled=36s, non-tiled=22s]
BiggSky can perform blind deconvolution and requires the Matlab runtime library to be installed in order to run. The software is in the beta stage of development and can be downloaded at https://biggsky.com/. Documentation can be found at https://biggsky.com/ under the LEARN tab. The Matlab Runtime is downloaded and installed as part of BiggSky installation process. Once installed, a 30-day evaluation license can be requested via the application.
The software can process lunar, solar, planetary and deep sky objects and provides functionality such as blind deconvolution, denoise, crop, stacking, calibration, image analysis and project management.
BiggSky processing the 7 lunar panels looks like this:
- BiggSky.JPG (155.88 KiB) Viewed 2746 times
I have only been in possession of BiggSky for 3 days and am working my way through the functionality. The Endymion image above was stacked in Autostakkert, deconvolved and cropped in BiggSky and had no further processing.
Higher resolution images of the above can be found at my astrobin account https://www.astrobin.com/wn690l/ and https://www.astrobin.com/az9cj6/
There are some threads on Cloudy Nights where people are sharing their experiences with BiggSky.
I hope you find this post useful.
Dave
