Astronomy

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Activities

Star-gazing on clear nights, even when it's cold out.

I have my father's 4.5" Newtonian telescope, which doesn't work in cold weather, unfortunately. It's pretty good in above freezing temperatures, however.

Astrophotography

I have been using the telescope with a smartphone adapter to hold my smartphone over an eyepiece.

This allows me to capture video with my phone, which I can then process into stacked images using a few software applications.

Software

PIPP

I use this for the first stage of processing, which includes cropping the video around an area of interest, and converting the video format to linear.

It is mostly for planetary imaging.

AutoStakkert 3

This is where the image stacking takes place. It judges the quality of each frame.

Then, it morphs the highest quality frames to overlap features, and can do this with subpixel accuracy.

With enough frames, it can "Drizzle" to produce a higher resolution output than the input frames.

It is fiddly, and can produce artifacts if the matching regions are not carefully chosen.

RegiStax 6

This does TIFF and RAW wavelet deconvolution, which can greatly enhance the sharpness of images.

This is fiddly and seems to work best when the input is blurry due to diffraction limiting, or chromatic abberation. If the source doesn't have enough frames, the wavelets will produce more artifacts before they can sharpen anything, and will tend to make weird-looking results.