Original subtitles

hey everyone it's Mike here with the

Astro explores and what I wanted to do

tonight was go ahead and process that

video that we took of Saturn so I'm

going to go through show you where to

get the software from uh I'm not going

to show you how to install it that's

pretty easy just install it like every

other software but I'm going to show you

the different steps and how to use that

software in order to get an image for

your planetary photos so keep watching

and I'll go through the step-by-step

guide

and uh if you have any questions along

the way feel free to leave them in the

comments below all right so the first

thing that we're going to need to do is

download pip uh looks like Pips actually

changed locations from its original

website uh took me a little bit of

digging in order to redownload it but

I'm going to provide the link in the uh

section below and the details and what

you want to do is just click on the

download over here and that's where

you're going to get p software and what

the software is going to allow us to do

is actually Center the

planet okay so what we're going to do is

we're going to open

pit we're going to choose

planetary and we're going to choose add

image

files and what I saved out was a server

file uh might also be a avi file

depending on what you're

using and we're going to let it go ahead

and enable de

bearing and we can

see the image capture right here we can

also see that we got

9,647 frames so we don't need all of

those frames so what we're going to do

is we're going to go to Quality options

we're going to do enable quality

estimation and we're going to tell it

let's just keep the best 9,000 for now

now we're going to choose output options

we want it to save as an

Avi and then we're going

to go to do

process and then what we'll do is we'll

ask it to start processing and what

that's going to do is it's going to take

our shaky planet and Center it so we

have have a complete video of it all in

one location and I'll be able to show

you what that Avi looks like here in a

moment after this

processes and as you can see processing

is pretty quick it's going through those

9,000

frames and then it's sorting

it and now we're complete so we can open

that output

folder and now we have a a new

video and when we look at it we don't

have that shakiness anymore that we used

to have now we have the planet

stationary and that's going to help us

in our next thing uh next software

called Auto stacker which is going to

actually take these frames choose the

best sections from all of them and

create a single Tiff

image so and auto stacker and I'll

provide this link in the description

below as well you just click on

downloads and you'll be able to download

it from right here I've already done

that so I'm going to go ahead and

open auto

stacker and you'll see that come over

I'm going to open our

image you'll see that we have our pit

file

and then I'm going to choose 24 if it's

not already selected here and I'm going

to ask it to place the grid now what

this Grid's doing is it's analyzing

different areas of the image and I'm

actually going to go down to 16 until it

the placees the grid again and you see

that it actually starts covering more of

the image it's not covering all of the

rings at this time so I'm going to go

ahead and add just a couple more boxes

here make sure that our entire image is

picked now I'm going to tell it to

analyze so it's going to go through and

analyze all the 9,000 frames that we had

and this can take a minute so depending

on how powerful your computer is um it

can take a minute or two but just sit

tight let it do its work

okay so as we can see our quality isn't

that

great um unfortunately when I was doing

the actual capture we didn't have the

best sky at the time so there's

different things you can do to improve

that quality have a nice clear sky uh

make sure your focus is spot on things

along those lines so I'm only going to

tell it to take the best

25% of the frames and you can do that

right there

and then I'm going to tell it to drizzle

by one and a half times and that's going

to increase the image size a little and

then we're also going to have it come

out as a tiff file so once we have these

settings

selected and we just hit

stack and again that can take a couple

minutes depending on your

computers so what we'll do is we'll just

go ahead and fast forward this section

right

here okay so that took about 2

minutes to process uh it's not too bad

and what we're going to do now that we

have a image from that and I can pull

that up

so this is our image of Saturn and when

we compare

that let me go ahead and pull up the

video so there's the

video and there's our

image and you can actually see that our

image actually looks quite a bit better

so

what it did was it took the actual best

sections of those frames that it could

calculate to give us a solid image so

now what we're going to do is we're

going to Open regist Stacks and with

regist Stacks uh what we'll be able to

do

is update some of the colors and try to

fine-tune some of the sharpen on here so

for reg Stacks uh provide the link again

in the description but what you'll want

to do is go ahead and download and

install the version 6.1 release first

and then install the update the

6.1.0 and as you can see the software

has not been updated in quite some time

but this is what we're

using so I'm going to go ahead and open

regist stxs

we're going to click on

select and we're going to allow to

stretch the intensity

levels and then the first thing I want

to do is just go ahead and come over to

RGB

balance and we can choose Auto

balance and we get kind of more of that

more natural color that that we're used

to when we look at Saturn we'll close

that we're also going to flip and

rotate there we go so that should match

the position Saturn was

in we'll close that we can also come to

our

histogram and if we pull this

over and CH

stretch we're going to brighten our

image here we don't want to go too far

because we don't want to blow it out but

that's what we're able to do with our

histogram we can also come the other

direction if we want to make some of the

areas darker as

well and a lot of this is just going to

be personal fine tuning trying to find

what looks best to you visually if you

want to see a little bit larger of the

image you can choose the zoom pane I'm

sorry the zoom panel and what we'll do

is we're going to start off by

unclicking layer

one so these are our wavelets this is

what's actually going to allow us to

sharpen the

image and what tends to work best is

starting at the bottom because this is

going to give us kind of the most fine

tone uh sharpening as you can see we get

kind of that fine detail where if we

start here at the

top we get kind of a more overall image

and sharpen so what we'll do is we'll

kind of start at the bottom and we can

start seeing some of those Cloud rings

come through and we'll just kind of

increase these ever so

slightly and if you

find something that you like and we can

start seeing kind of the Rings in here

as well coming through uh you're

actually able to save the scheme so if

you are doing a lot of planetary

photography and you have a setup that

you like you can save it and load it and

that'll give you a good Baseline to work

from so as you can see we're starting to

get a little bit of that uh artifacting

here so we might back off on here a

little and then you can

also oh

use one if it'll let me click

it uh but it doesn't seem to be doing

what we want today so we're just going

to leave that off uh but if you want to

increase the intensity again what you

can do is you can actually use your

controls here and boost it so as you can

see every time I increase this our

actual sharpness is increasing if I want

to decrease it we kind of lose some of

that overall

sharpness and again it is really playing

with what you

find is most visually appealing to

you uh I have a tendency of

oversharpening uh but that's just me so

so uh if you find yourself going a

little over control that's okay or out

of control that's okay uh it happens to

the best of us and I'm not even saying

I'm the best of

us so that looking like a pretty good

sharp image of Saturn right now

especially if we compare it to our

image here so as you can see we've been

able to pull out some of those details

and the clouds uh we've got our ring and

then what we have to do to save it is we

tell it to do everything we've done so

far so we're going to say do all and

actually applies those items and then we

choose save image and we can save that

as a

PNG click save and

now when we come in here we should have

our PNG of the image that we just

created so that's the

simple uh process of being able to take

your videos that you've been

making um use pip to Center the object

so that it's not bouncing around the

screen which allows Auto stacker to pick

the best sections of those frames and

then we use reg Stacks to do our color

correct Direction and our sharpening so

that's the real easy quick process of

doing it it does take a little bit of

practice just to find your way around

the different software but once you've

done it a couple times it's real easy to

do and then from there it's just finding

what is aesthetically pleasing to you so

with that being said I hope you enjoyed

this video uh like I said when we

started if you had any questions or

comments just leave those below uh if

you are enjoying these videos uh Please

Subscribe I'm going to be doing the next

video on actually how to find the Sun

during the day uh so there's a fun

little item that you can 3D print to be

able to find that so that'll be the next

video and then after that I'll probably

get into moving into what a equatorial

Mount is so and with that being said I'm

going to call it night happy stargazing

to all of you