Quick start guide 1 - first steps

For the impatient ones, here comes a list of steps to perform for a first run of the plugin:
Preparation...
  • 1 point your telescope to your favourite planet
  • 2 start FireCapture and get the planet on the screen. Start autoguiding and make sure that it works as it should, so that the planet stays more or less at the same position on the screen.
  • 3 it is recommended to chose a night time setting with good conditions, so that the planet appears with strong contrast against the dark sky, and the usability rate of the frames is high. Also, choose reasonable exposure times, e.g. between a few ms and a few 10 ms.
  • 4 draw a ROI around the planet sufficiently big enough that the planet stays within the ROI according to your current mount/autoguiding accuracy. Activate FCs 'Auto-align' feature (the one which keeps the planet in the center of the ROI and shows the 4 red dots.) The plugin has its own centering algorithm, but alignment is critical for stacking, so it is better to do it twice.
    Due to a current limitation, the ROI should be either apprioximately quadratic, or with a width greater than the height.
  • 5 launch the PEAAnuts plugin from the Firecapture interface. Set a suitable size for the stream preview window with the drop-down box such that the extracted planet image fits into it with some comfotable margin.
If all works OK, you should see the planet in the stream preview window. This appears less noisy than the FCs ROI preview due to a minimal averaging performed in the plugin. Twiddle around with the focuser to produce a sharp image.

Mono/Color cams: If you are using FC 2.7 with a color cam, you need to activate debayering in the plugin. See the chapter Color mode for further info.

When all is set, you may move forward to the next step, the ...
...live stacking
  • 6 click on the 'LvStk' switch in the top row of the stream preview window. The switch turns green and a second frame, the live stacking frame pops up. Below the -yet empty- image, two lines of data appear with info about the current stacking process (upper row) and the recently finished stack (lower row). Stacking starts with an initializing process. For usual exposure times (s.a.), the first initializing stack will appear quite soon. In the initializing process, no quality checking is done. The lower data row, appears in red color. Initializing needs two runs, so quite soon a second initializing image will be ready, the lower data row changes to yellow. Now initializing is complete, and the stacking starts with quality based frame rejection/acceptance. The current frame quality is shown in the moving graph below the image. If all runs well, enough frames will pass the quality check, and are piled up in the stack. The small indicator to the right shows the actual acceptance rate. When the first full stack is ready, the lower data line changes to green. From now on, stacking continues with the given settings until it is manually stopped, for example by clicking on the green 'LvStck' button in the stream preview window again.
  • 7 the image will appear with a minimal default sharpening. Of course, stronger postprocessing settings can be used, it is possible to adjust brightness, gamma and color balance, images can be saved, either manually or automatically, etc.
If all went well so far, you have gained a basic understanding how the tool works in principle. Congratulations ! But there is a lot more to explain. So continue with the next chapters, which cover each step of the process flow in more detail.