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RegiStax V4 is not bad in some respects. It's object tracking system appears to be quite good. It does not rotate images during it's alignment process. Rather, you select every point of interest and it aligns each object individually. This may sound aok, but it really doesn't work for many deep sky images or planetary ones either. Consider taking a picture of Jupiter with it's bands. Your polar aligned telescope is rotating as the telescope tracks the object. RegiStax can find the center of Jupiter, but as Jupiter rotates in the image, RegiStax doesn't compensate for the rotation, thus the bands on Jupiter will be smeared. This also happens on Nebula and Galaxy objects - the detail of the extremities is smeared. The other features of RegiStax V4 are substandard - Meade's drizzle and image processing are easier to work with and provide nice results, RegiStax's results with default and obvious settings were not as good Meade with default and obvious settings. This new process, # 2, is based on using RegiStax V4 for object tracking only. This is accomplished by saving the project file after RegiStax has performed an object alignment. The project file contains the offsets in the image of the object, which is used to manipulate the images in software I wrote. RegiStax and AstroStack both require that the images be named in a fashion that sorting them by name will put the images in order. RegiStax also requires that FITS images be in the 16 bit integer format only. AstroStack V3 is a really cool product that allows you to setup a processing series that the software goes thru. Once you like a particular series of filters and processes, you can save them for use on other images of this or other objects. The variety of the functions given are not bad, but usage of this system is difficult. It is written in Java and the developer provides documentation to write your own modules. I have consulted with the programmer about some issues I had and he was most helpful. I abandoned this software at this time as it didn't seem to have value over what I had tried during process #2. It appeared to have difficultly with the rotational issues of a polar mount, something Drizzle processing is supposed to take advantage of. K3CCDtools V3 is also an interesting software. It seems to be somewhat buggy and crashes, especially when using the DSI image capture feature. It does not do a good job of capturing, as the exposure time adjustment is not very flexible and will not go below 1/250th of a second. I found no value in this software. This software uses the Meade DSI USB driver software. I figure he turned on the USB log for the DSI port and viewed what was sent and received in the log verses what was "saved" as RAW. Sounds like we could write our own capture software and process the data ourselves. This would only have value if (we went commercial with this software or) we found the data coming from the DSI USB interface was different than the RAW images saved by the Envisage software, eg, the data from the imager was processed in some fashion before saving it as "raw". Iris V5.4 - I have not taken the time to evaluate this software. It appears on the surface to be very complete. Naill has abandoned RegiStax and AstroStack for Iris. Future investigations will include evaluating this software. |
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