From November, 2009. Tycho at prime focus f/15. This was captured as a quicktime movie with AstroIIDC and a Point Grey Scorpion monochrome CCD camera. Converted to .avi, moved from mac to pc to process with Registax 6. 200 best frames of 449. 1799 alignment points. I have a new laptop dual-core2, SSD, 8Gb ram. While it took three attempts to get an image I liked, stacking 1800 alignment points took three minutes; a half-hour total with final touches in Gimp 2.
From 2009 posting: Shot at f/15, 449 frames 339 stacked: 95% quality. This is a crop from a 1.4Mp image, but wordpress reduced it about 50%. The best of the week: about an hour of computer time processing. (24 alignment points, create reference frame, sharpen, continue, optimize, stack, sharpen.) No processing in Photoshop except cropping and conversion to jpeg.
New Registax, new computer combined to halve the processing time for a better result with the same degree of fussiness. Moore’s law applied to astrophotography.
