Lunar 3-panel mosaic @ 4fps
Posted: Sat May 03, 2025 5:36 pm
A 3-panel mosaic captured 2nd May 2025, around 21:30 (twilight), 30% illumination, ~45° elevation.
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, Microsoft Image Composite Editor, Rawtherapee v5, GIMP.
Capture: each panel was SER, RAW8, black_level=0, gain=200, exposure=30ms, duration 127s, frames=500 @ 4fps
The capture produced 3x9Gb SER files. These were stacked by all 3 being dropped onto the Open button in AS!4.
60% of frames were stacked (that is frames > 50% quality. The Alignment Point size was set at 144 which gave 804 points. Drizzle was off (not needed with large capture area). Three useful things I noticed with AS!4:
This did not play well with either Registax6 or waveSharp2. I did use ColourCalibration in PixInsight to achieve colour balance followed by sharpening with MultiscaleMedianTransform.
However I decided to experiment with Rawtherapee. With the software I managed to achieve colour calibration, RL deconvolution, sharpening, lightening & contrast in one operation. The last part was repeated application of saturation in GIMP to achieve the desired colour effect.
A Rawtherapee article can be found at https://clarkvision.com/articles/astrop ... wtherapee/
A decent outcome for a 10m capture. Getting to grips with Rawtherapee took slightly longer
At least I now have a way forward for processing mosaics captured with an OSC camera.
Dave
- Moon_3-panel_mosaic_183C.jpg (289.73 KiB) Viewed 7149 times
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, Microsoft Image Composite Editor, Rawtherapee v5, GIMP.
Capture: each panel was SER, RAW8, black_level=0, gain=200, exposure=30ms, duration 127s, frames=500 @ 4fps
The capture produced 3x9Gb SER files. These were stacked by all 3 being dropped onto the Open button in AS!4.
- AS4_settings.JPG (142.98 KiB) Viewed 7149 times
60% of frames were stacked (that is frames > 50% quality. The Alignment Point size was set at 144 which gave 804 points. Drizzle was off (not needed with large capture area). Three useful things I noticed with AS!4:
- Automatic setting of the anchor point (useful for multi file processing)
- A histogram of the current frame is displayed
- The active SER file can be played back
- stitch.JPG (10.49 KiB) Viewed 7149 times
This did not play well with either Registax6 or waveSharp2. I did use ColourCalibration in PixInsight to achieve colour balance followed by sharpening with MultiscaleMedianTransform.
- PixInsight_colour_calibration.JPG (28.63 KiB) Viewed 7148 times
However I decided to experiment with Rawtherapee. With the software I managed to achieve colour calibration, RL deconvolution, sharpening, lightening & contrast in one operation. The last part was repeated application of saturation in GIMP to achieve the desired colour effect.
A Rawtherapee article can be found at https://clarkvision.com/articles/astrop ... wtherapee/
A decent outcome for a 10m capture. Getting to grips with Rawtherapee took slightly longer
At least I now have a way forward for processing mosaics captured with an OSC camera.Dave