Stochastic 'Lucky' Imaging of Venus with AstroDMx Capture for Linux

Click on an image to get a closer view.

Venus over the Afan Valley. The star Elnath is visible above it

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

AstroDMx Capture for Linux was used to capture a 50,000-frame SER file of the 11.9% crescent Venus 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 are 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.

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. 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.

11.9% crescent Venus

Steve Wainwright and Nicola Mackin