Quick start guide 3 - live stacking![]() A click on 'LvStk' opens the live stacking window and immediately starts a stacking session. After two short initialization preruns, the quality algorithm starts to work. Frames are accepted or rejected according to their quality value and the chosen quality limit. The quality of the incoming frames is shown in the graph below the live stack image. The chosen quality limit appears as a thin red line. You need to take what you can get, so if all or too much of the yellow quality points stay below the limit, you have to reduce your demands. A second form of process info is the small indicator to the right of the graph, which displays the actual acceptance ratio, meaning the current fraction of analysed frames which get accepted for the stack (range 0-100%). Reduce the quality limit if the indicator stays very low or zero. Raise it if the indicator moves up to 100%, meaning every incoming frame is accepted. Of course, the whole business depends strongly on the seeing conditions. In contrast to the old school way of stacking a stream of recorded frames, in live stacking it is advisable to avoid very high quality demands. As a rule of thumb, acceptance rates between 30% and 70% usually produce good results. Final image quality also depends on the amount of stacked images. Here, general reccomendations are difficult, because gain and exposure setting, planet rotation, seeing, the amount of sharpening which is applied to the stack, etc. all have a significant influence. The default stack count setting is 1000, which may serve as starting point. Mars and esp. Venus, which exhibit slow rotation, usually allow higher counts than e.g. Jupiter. The stack count parameter is located directly above the mentioned qualitiy limit in the dialog. Note that changes only will be considered for the next stack, not the one actually in progress. Saving of imagesThe images generated by the live stacking modules can be saved. Clicking on 'Save' will do that directly, without asking for a filename and location. This would need too much time, inbetween the image might be overwritten by the next stack. The AS button activates auto-saving.Filenames are generated automatically in WinJupos format. The location on disk can be set in the profile (see quickstart step 5 on Administration). Consult the chapter Live stacking for further details. |