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.
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