John Frattura
Saturn - 2015, 05-26, using AstroStax
Saturn, from raw to final.
The top left frame, is a raw video frame taken from a video I shot, using my Meade telescope, and my Canon t2i camera. The video is very dark for 2 reasons. First I used eyepiece projection, which gives a larger image, at the expense of illumination. And also, I used Canon's 640x480 crop. This also produces a larger, but dimmer image.
The top right frame, is the same video viewed with the VLC (VideoLAN) player. I used the player's Brightness/Contrast filter to brighten up the video to an acceptable amount.
Although this image is much brighter than the unfiltered frame, the image is essentially a bunch of camera noise, roughly in the shape of Saturn. However, buried within all that noise, is a small percentage of actual signal.
I saved 3,356 frames from a few videos, that were all shot within a 1/2 hr period. All the frames generally look this bad. All are saturated with random camera noise. And all have random atmospheric distortions of the shape of the planet.
The lower left frame is the image created by stacking those 3,356 frames, using my almost finished program: AstroStax. AstroStax finds and aligns the object, without the need of any user input. Simply drag and drop the frames onto the program, and wait. In this case, using 3,356 frames, that are 640x480 pixels, the wait was about 2 minutes. The more images that are stacked, the greater the improvement in the signal to noise ratio. The signal builds, while the random noise gets cancelled out.
Finally, the lower right frame was created by adjusting a few of the sliders, in AstroStax's "Enhance" filter. The Enhance filter detects and enhances minute, undetectable differences in the image's detail. This final image really gives the maximum amount of detail possible, based on limitations of my telescope's optics combined with the poor atmospheric seeing at the time.
In addition to the not so great atmospheric seeing, I shot these videos across an asphalt parking lot, and over a few brick buildings, which further degraded the quality of the videos (asphalt and brick radiate all the heat they've accumulated during the day, back up into the atmosphere at night. Heat messes up the image/video).
Saturn - 2015, 05-26, using AstroStax
Saturn, from raw to final.
The top left frame, is a raw video frame taken from a video I shot, using my Meade telescope, and my Canon t2i camera. The video is very dark for 2 reasons. First I used eyepiece projection, which gives a larger image, at the expense of illumination. And also, I used Canon's 640x480 crop. This also produces a larger, but dimmer image.
The top right frame, is the same video viewed with the VLC (VideoLAN) player. I used the player's Brightness/Contrast filter to brighten up the video to an acceptable amount.
Although this image is much brighter than the unfiltered frame, the image is essentially a bunch of camera noise, roughly in the shape of Saturn. However, buried within all that noise, is a small percentage of actual signal.
I saved 3,356 frames from a few videos, that were all shot within a 1/2 hr period. All the frames generally look this bad. All are saturated with random camera noise. And all have random atmospheric distortions of the shape of the planet.
The lower left frame is the image created by stacking those 3,356 frames, using my almost finished program: AstroStax. AstroStax finds and aligns the object, without the need of any user input. Simply drag and drop the frames onto the program, and wait. In this case, using 3,356 frames, that are 640x480 pixels, the wait was about 2 minutes. The more images that are stacked, the greater the improvement in the signal to noise ratio. The signal builds, while the random noise gets cancelled out.
Finally, the lower right frame was created by adjusting a few of the sliders, in AstroStax's "Enhance" filter. The Enhance filter detects and enhances minute, undetectable differences in the image's detail. This final image really gives the maximum amount of detail possible, based on limitations of my telescope's optics combined with the poor atmospheric seeing at the time.
In addition to the not so great atmospheric seeing, I shot these videos across an asphalt parking lot, and over a few brick buildings, which further degraded the quality of the videos (asphalt and brick radiate all the heat they've accumulated during the day, back up into the atmosphere at night. Heat messes up the image/video).