TechIdiots Forum

Went out last night since it was nice and clear and wanted to take some video of Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars to try out stacking them.

I found the program Autostakkert at autostakkert.com and it works really well with manually tracked objects. It is able to easily find the object and keep it centered, while also removing any frames that are heavily blurred or out of focus.

I started with this as a single frames of Jupiter (about 22,000 of them from a 6 minute video):

3577.png (195.77 KiB) Viewed 23547 times

After stacking the best 9000 frames, It put out this:

22_44_14_g3_ap11_conv.png (1.36 MiB) Viewed 23547 times

Not perfect, but much better than a single frame.


Then I moved onto Saturn.

Sample of what the ~22,000 frames of Saturn looked like:

saturn_5252016.png (299.64 KiB) Viewed 23547 times

After stacking the best 9000 frames, it output this:

22_57_04_g3_ap11_conv.png (1.64 MiB) Viewed 23547 times

Still have some work to do to get better, but at least it looks like small progress.

Made a composite of the objects I have imaged so far:

Sun - Jupiter - Saturn.

b4MYGrG[1].png (488.92 KiB) Viewed 23532 times

Hi Phil - Maybe it's just me, but all the image links appear broken...

No it's not you, the file sync script Andrew uses to sync the forum is broken and he has not fixed it yet. You should be able to see them on the forum2 node.

[quote="pferland"]Went out last night since it was nice and clear and wanted to take some video of Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars to try out stacking them.

I found the program Autostakkert at autostakkert.com and it works really well with manually tracked objects. It is able to easily find the object and keep it centered, while also removing any frames that are heavily blurred or out of focus.

Incredible. Who would have thought there were bands and rings in any of the fuzzy single photos, but with stacking the detail comes out. That's awesome. Yep, now you have reached the limits of post-processing - time for a better scope!

Yeah it truly is amazing what shows up in detail over a good amount of time with stacking. The first few attempts I did of Saturn came out as a blurry streak around the image lol. I have been thinking about getting a color camera also just so I can take some quick videos for now and use the monochrome one for the more dedicated nights with the filter wheel.


I want to get a schmidt cassegrain, not sure what size yet though. At least they are much shorter than the 130x900mm Newtonian I have now. I think I am going to go with a celestron for the schmidt cassegrain I have read some really good things about them. Not that themOrion I have now isn't good, I would like to try them all out and pick my favorite, lol. I might give the 130x900mm to my parents, they have been talking about it since I have been getting more engrossed in it lol.