Testing AstroDMx Capture for Windows on the 12.8% crescent Venus with Stochastic ('Lucky') Imaging

Testing AstroDMx Capture for Windows with 

Stochastic Imaging

Using a Skymax 127 Maksutov mounted on a Celestron AVX mount with a ZWO ASI178MC camera fitted with a 2.5x Barlow.

A pre-release version of our AstroDMx Capture for Windows was running on a Lenovo ThinkPad X230. A 30,000-frame SER file of 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 the capture an undebayered SER file. As Autostakkert! can debayer the SER file when stacking, it makes no sense to capture RGB frames, which will be 3 times the size for saving, and therefore can slow down the capture process. The colour information is encoded in the RAW frames of the SER file.

Click on the image to get a closer view.

Screenshot of AstroDMx Capture for Windows 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. This process of collecting large numbers of high speed frames, discarding all but the best, keeping sufficient to take advantage of the increase in signal to noise ratio with stacking, is called Stochastic ('Lucky') imaging.

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

12.8% crescent Venus

Steve Wainwright and Nicola Mackin