Jim Honeycutt reminded me this past Saturday that RegiStax 5 is available in beta, so since I haven’t been able to image lately, I decided to download it and give it a try on some earlier sets. 

This image was processed with version 5.  I hadn’t bothered to process this set because of the softness of the avi’s.  This one was taken at 07:37UT on February 1st, 2009, CMI: 161.5  CMII: 122.9   CMIII: 14.2:

The avi’s were bouncing around somewhat with a seeing estimate of 3-4/10.  It was taken with a Skynyx2-0M and C14 at F/25.71; Custom Scientific RGB filters.

I was somewhat happy with the results, especially since I’d given up on this set.  Registax5 seemed to pull out some interesting detail from very limited data.

The following is a comparison of the same image processed by Registax4 and 5.  In this comparison, the v5 image seems to have more noise, but I may have gone too far with wavelet processing on my first try with v5.  I typically apply wavelets modestly and let PhotoShop do the rest, but I wanted to test the limits.

I’m happy to see progress on this excellent FREE software for stacking astronomical images.  Being a programmer myself, I know that developing software like this takes hundreds if not thousands of hours of work by dedicated individuals.   Many thanks to the Registax version5 team!

Download RegiStax version 5 here (beta now – released version soon).

Larry