Friday 15 May 2020

Stochastic 'Lucky' Imaging of the 11.9% crescent Venus with AstroDMx Capture for Linux

A Skymax 127 Maksutov was mounted on a Celestron AVX mount. A ZWO ASI178MC camera fitted with a 2.5x Barlow was placed at the Cassegrain focus of the Maksutov.

AstroDMx Capture for Linux was running on a 9th generation, Core i7, PC Specialist Laptop, running Fedora Linux.

A 50,000-frame SER file of the 11.9%  crescent Venus was captured with a region of interest of 800 x 608 at 166 fps. To ensure the fastest possible frame-rate, AstroDMx Capture was set to fully debayer the screen display, but to capture an undebayered SER file. As Autostakkert! can debayer the SER file when stacking, it makes no sense to capture RGB frames, which are 3 times the size of undebayered frames for saving, and therefore can slow down the capture process. The colour information is encoded in the RAW frames of the SER file.

Screenshot of AstroDMx Capture for Linux capturing data on Venus.

The best 1% of the frames in the file were stacked in Autostakkert! 3.1 with RGB channel alignment. The final image was wavelet processed in Registax 6 and post processed in the Gimp 2.10.

11.9% crescent Venus

To find out more about Stochastic, 'Lucky' imaging, click HERE.

A couple of UI bugs need to be sorted out, following the code unification across Linux, macOS and Windows, before the next release of AstroDMx Capture for Linux.