By Doug Bickley
An example of what can be achieved with the society’s Coronado PST.
- AVI taken with Coronado PST and Orion webcam on 12 August at 12:11.
- 200 frames captured – because turning the tripod Alt-Az controls in different directions and different speeds can be a bit challenging over a long period I didn’t successfully manage more frames than this.
- Several AVI’s taken before I finished the session, and later on selected the best one.
- AVI selected was a 720mb file. Opened in RegiStax 6 and let it find the best 100 frames and stack these (tried higher and lower frame count but 50% worked out good). Didn’t do much with wavelets at all.
- Saved as a tiff file and opened the Adobe Photoshop CS2 (the free one!!!). Adjustment layers for levels, curves and hue/saturation, brightness/contrast – then when satisfied flattened layers and added slight smart sharpen. Disc of sun only selected and copied as new layer, size increased very slightly and layers flattened again to get rid of ring around it.
- Resized and cropped to A4.
- Saved as TIFF and JPEG.
- Printed a nice copy out for my file.
- Coffee and self congratulation.