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Summary of Contents for Celestron NexImage
- Page 1 Table of Contents Quick-Start and Tutorial Imaging Basics Registax User’s Guide Troubleshooting...
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Page 2: Quick Start
Make sure your NexImage comes with all of the following: 1. Plug camera into the USB port of your computer. 2. Double click the Amcap icon to start the program. 3. Make sure “Preview” is selected from the Options menu. If “Preview” is not already selected (checked), click on it once. - Page 3 7. From the Options menu select the ideo Capture Filter. Adjust the Brightness and Gain settings to make sure the image is not over or under exposed. In order to control the gain setting, deselect (uncheck) the Auto box under the Exposure group of controls.
- Page 4 10. From the Capture menu, choose Set Time Limit. This determines how long of a video image will be recorded. • Check the Use Time Limit box • Set the time limit to the desired amount of time. For example 20 seconds. Now you are ready to capture the image.
- Page 5 RegiStax Tutorial Your NexImage CD ROM comes with a sample .AVI file which you can use to learn and experiment with the features of the included RegiStax software. This tutorial will guide you through the steps you need to align, stack and process video frames into a single high quality image.
- Page 6 4. Now its time to choose which frame from the video file we want to use as a reference. All the other images will be compared and aligned using the reference-image. To find a good candidate use the slider on the lower part of the screen.
- Page 7 Alignment Page Here you are presented with many different controls that are discussed in detail in the User's Guide. For this tutorial we will only discuss the most important features. On this screen you should see two smaller windows that are on top of the RegiStax Aligning window.
- Page 8 7. Set the "start" quality filter to 10. This will position the two green lines so that one is to the left of the blue line and one is to the right of the blue line. Setting the band “width” filter to 9 defines the area under the Registration Properties graph that is calculated as a proportion of the total area below the graph.
- Page 9 Processing Page The power of RegiStax sits in the usage of Wavelets. This is a special filtering technique that is very good for enhancing details in images. Each wavelet layer carries part of the image within it. The lower numbered wavelets control the fine detail stored in the image whereas the larger numbered wavelets control the coarse detail.
- Page 10 11. On the lower bottom there are two additional sliders called Contrast and Brightness, these can be used to prevent the image from becoming too bright. Notice that when you enhance the image with the layer-sliders the image contrast increases. You can control this by reducing the overall contrast with the contrast slider.
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Page 11: Parts List
(frames) that can be digitally stacked to significantly reduce the electric “noise” inherent in video chips and bring out the unseen fine detail (signal) hidden with in your image. The NexImage camera takes advantage of the fact that the signal to noise ratio of your stacked composite image is proportional to the square root of the number of frames combined. -
Page 12: Finding Objects
(and expensive) CCD cameras is the speed in which it can display its image. Focusing NexImage is more similar to focusing a eyepiece than a CCD camera. Unlike with long exposure cameras you don’t have to wait many seconds to see the effect of a focus change. - Page 13 Rotational speed of the planets Since the NexImage will combine as many sharp frames as possible to achieve one high quality image, you don’t want to take so many images that you start to detect the rotation of the planet. For example, assume that you do not want to take a series of images long enough to detect .25 arc seconds of motion.
- Page 14 User’s Guide...
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Page 15: Input Screen
Input Screen Controls/Features 1. Select Input (Button) – Press this button to start selecting images (bmp, jpeg, fits, tiff) or video sequences (avi) for processing. After the button is pressed a standard windows file-dialog (#4) will open. You can select single avi-files or multiple (use ctrl or shift) bmp’s, jpg’s, fit’s, tiff. - Page 16 6. LRGB (checkbox) – This is disabled for B/W processing so only becomes available when you process in color. LRGB allows you to have less color-artifacts during processing. 7. Processing Area (setting) – This is the size of the area of an image (width & height) that will automatically be processed during later stages.
- Page 17 Remember it is not necessary (or practical) to manually deselect the low quality frames from your sequence. Registax has built-in features that will automatically filter out low quality images based on individual frame quality and alignment differences. However, viewing the frame list will allow you the ability to scroll through and select a high quality, high contrast image to compare and align with all the other frames in the sequence (See Aligning Screen in next section).
- Page 18 17. Load Flatfield – Pressing this opens a dialog where the user can select a flatfield (bmp, fits) to use in processing. After selecting flatfield a checkbox will appear that needs to be set to actively use the chosen flatfield. (See #16) 18.
- Page 19 Aligning Screen The Aligning Screen contains all the controls needed to accurately and automatically register (align) each frame in your series. 1. Alignment Filter – The Alignment (FFT) filter is used to improve the initial alignment estimation. It reduces the noise from images that otherwise can be problematic during alignment.
- Page 20 6. Resampling – This control allows you to enlarge the images by interpolation to achieve sub-pixel quality alignment. This will however reduce processing speed greatly. In the processing page the images can be down sampled to their original size. The resampling options are: Bell –...
- Page 21 During optimization the program searches for the "best fit" in a box with a dimension set by the search area control. At every optimization run (through all the frames) the program searches the best possible shift for every frame versus the reference frame you selected. Every run starts with the latest optimal shift.
- Page 22 Setting the FFT Filter The Registration Properties graph shows a power-spectrum histogram (red- line) where the resolution increases from left to right. The rightmost part deals with the finest details of the image. Sharp images have a longer tail (to the right) than blurred images. The FFT filter line (blue) should be positioned well to the right of the middle of the bend in the curve, but not to where the red line reaches y=0.
- Page 23 Stacking Screen The stacking phase aims at increasing the signal to noise ratio in the final images. When you have used Align & Stack on the Align Page you will automatically pass through the stacking page and advance directly to the Image Processing page. You can however return to this page from the processing page.
- Page 24 The effect of both sliders on the total number of images to be stacked will be shown in the lower part of the screen (text). 2. Show Stacklist – When this checkbox is set, it will open a window that allows you to select/deselect images of a sequence at will.
- Page 25 Small values are useful for small-scaled (few pixels and sharp images) features and large values for larger scaled features. The “best” settings depends on the imaged subject and the image-scale during recording (Eyepiece, telescope etc). Use these settings in combination with the wavelet-filter settings.
- Page 26 2. Wavelet sliders – The sliders run from -5 to 100 in steps of 0.1. The information available for a layer can be seen by pressing the button above the slider. This will shows the "information" in the layer. High-intensity red means that the pixel-intensity of this area will decrease when the slider is moved to the right, high-intensity green means an increase in value will result from that action.
- Page 27 is done with one of the re-sampling filters and you can choose it directly in the Resize w i n d o w. Also you can go back to the original input image scale by pressing "original". The Resize window has an easy system to resize by %'s 25, 50, 75, 100, 150 and 200 a re pre - p rogrammed settings 11.
- Page 28 14. Noise reduction (options panel) – Noise reduction is an advanced feature of Registax. At the wavelet-page under options you can set the checkbox "Noise reduction". The noise reduction window will appear. This has a set of sliders and checkboxes for every corresponding wavelet layer.
- Page 29 16. Gamma Curve checkbox and Gamma thumbwheel control – In addition to the gamma-control this curve allows you to set the gamma-response yourself. By default the relation between image-intensity and output is set to 1 (straight line) equalling a gamma=1 setting. But you can change the shape of the curve by dragging the anchor (red circle) or adding new anchors (right-click) to the line.
- Page 30 Final Processing Screen Many users wanted to do some simple additional processing after the wavelets before saving the images. 1. Controls – Flip X and Flip Y: These are easy ways to flip images around the X and Y axes 2.
- Page 31 4. Advanced HLS – This allows the change of hue/saturation/lightness for the different colour-bands in the image. You can for instance only saturate the red-orange colours in an image. Or you can make those bluish parts of the image have a lower lightness and become less obvious.
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Page 32: Troubleshooting
Troubleshooting The Registax screens are cutoff on the monitor display. Registax software is best viewed with you monitor set to 1024 x 768 screen resolution or higher. To check or change your screens resolution, select Display Properties from your computers Control Panel. Registax software can not open my video file? Make sure that the video file you are trying to open has the .avi extension after the file name. - Page 33 The normal audio setting on my computer do not work correctly after installing the software? If you experience any problems with audio devices used with your computer, it may be necessary to change your recording device back to their original default setting. From your computer’s Control Panel, select “Sound and Audio Devices Properties”...
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