Bugs and Bitches

A Facebook discussion led Don Heffernan to do a little testing that was informative to him and he hopes will inform others… or show that he's mistaken.

On another thread we were discussing the fact that Seestar produces an AVI video in addition to MP4 when you request it to save as RAW. They're needed for sun/moon p[rpocessing programs like Autostakkert and Astrosurface that quality check and stack the best video frames to produce the best result despite poor seeing.

It's called “lucky imaging” or “stochastic imaging” because your betting on the odds that a few minutes of video will have a few really good frames that you can combine to make a sharp image

We noticed that the Seestar MP4s appear to be sharper and have more contrast than the AVIs. That led me to speculate that the Seestar could be converting the MP4 to AVI with compression and/or or lossy codecs.

So I converted a Seestar MP4 to AVI using the PIPP program. That produced an uncompressed AVI about 6 times larger than the Seestar AVI.

When I stacked the PIPP converted AVI in Astrosurface and saved the stacked result with no additional processing other than a levels tweak, it produced an image far superior to the one I had produced from the Seestar AVI! My conclusion, subject to debunking, is that we should avoid the Seestar AVI and convert their MP4s with a third party app.

That has the advantage of saving limited disk space on the Seestar. After conversion and processing on a computer we can safely delete the massive AVIs and keep the MP4s as backup.

There apparently must not be a similar problem with the Seestar FITS files because the images people are creating from those files are simply too spectacular.