Celestron NexImage User manual

Quick-Start and Tutorial

Imaging Basics

Registax User’s Guide

Troubleshooting

Table of Contents

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 on your computer’s desktop

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.

4. Select an easy target like the moon to begin with. Center and focus your

telescope on the specific feature you wish to image.

5. Remove the barrel cap from the 1.25” barrel of the imager.

Remove the eyepiece from the telescope and slide the barrel

of the imager into the eyepiece barrel of your telescope.

You should see bright light displayed in the imaging window of Amcap.

6. Use your telescopes focuser to focus down the image until the moon is visible

and sharp.

USB Cable

1.25” Barrel

Installation CD Rom

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.

Once the desired image is focused and centered in the imaging window you are

ready to capture a video image. Before taking the image you must first set the

frame rate, time limit and resolution for the video.

8. From the Options menu select

the Video Capture Pin.

•Set the output size

to 640x480 resolution.

• Set the compression to I420

9. From the Capture menu, choose Set Frame Rate.

• Check the Use Frame Rate box

•Set the frame rate to the desired frames

per second. For example 30 f/sec.

7. From the Options menu select

the ideo Capture Filter.

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.

11. From the Capture menu select Start Capture

• Select OK to begin

image capture.

The bottom of the imaging window will display the amount time of video

recorded and the number of frames captured.

12. Once recording stops select Set Capture File from the File menu. Select

a location on your hard drive and name the file that you have taken

including the .avi extension at the end, for example, moon.avi.

Now that your video stream has been captured the individual frames can be

inspected, aligned and stacked using the included RegiStax software. Before

you begin processing your image, take a moment to read and use the tutorial

provided in the next section.

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.

1. Start RegiStax by clicking the icon on your desktop.

Press the Select Input button to select the directory where the NexImage

CD is located.

2. Select the file called Lunar Tutorial.avi from the Celestron folder

and press Open.

3. Next, indicate what type of image is being processed. Is it a color image

of a planet or a black and white image. Since the image being processed

is of the moon, color is not important. Uncheck the color checkbox otherwise

leave this checkbox checked.

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. Just select the slider and step through the images to find an

image that looks high in contrast and sharpness.

Alternatively, you can check the Show frame list box in the lower left corner

and scroll through each frame individually.

5. Once the alignment frame has been selected, you need to set the size of the

alignment box. Ideally this box will contain either the whole object you have

imaged or a bright, high contrast feature. You can set this box to a square of

32, 64, 128 or 256 pixels in size. Select a size and move your cursor over

the image. For this example choose 128 and move the square around one

of the major craters and press the LEFT mouse button. RegiStax will now take

you to the alignment page.

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. One of them is the FFT-spectrum and the other is

called Registration properties. They are displayed using the two checkboxes

under the Options box. Both of these panels are useful when aligning images.

6. FFT-spectrum. This filter is used to estimate the alignment shift between the

reference frame and the rest of the frames in the sequence. Your initial image

should show a multi-colored square with a red circular area in the middle.

The red area in the middle represents where the program estimates the best

alignment. The FFT-spectrum is used to calculate the similarity between

images and estimates the best shift when aligning the images. Increase the

value of the Alignment filter to 12 and press the Recalc FFT button. Notice

that the red-area becomes smaller and the blue line in the Registration

properties graph changes position. Ideally only a small group of pixels

in the image should become red. This part of the image is used to register

(align) the images more accurately.

The next step is to weed out the blurred frames from your video sequence. The

Quality Filter Band shows the distribution of large and small details on each

frame. Images that show a high number of small features are a good indication

that the image is sharp.

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. Ideally one of the vertical green lines should lie on the lower part

of the red curve while the other is positioned where the red-curve nearly

touches the bottom.

8. Press Align & Stack and Registax will automatically start the alignment

process. During this stage the program determines how much the object is

misaligned compared to the reference for every frame in the AVI file. Next

is the optimization process where only frames with good image quality are

optimized further. This is a more precise way of aligning the images. Once

all the frames are aligned and stacked you will automatically go to the

Processing Page.

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. Each layer can be adjusted individually to reveal the desired

amount of detail for your image. The processing page is where it all happens!

9. Before processing your image it is a good idea to save the aligned and

stacked image as a Registax file before processing. This will allow you

maintain your pre-processed image without having to go through the Stack

and Align process over again.

10. On the right side of this screen are the six wavelet sliders that are

numbered from 1 to 6. Start by moving slider #1 to a value of 50 and

watch the image change when you release the slider. Move slider 1 back

to its origin (or press Reset) and now move slider 2 to a value of 50, notice

that this slider also changes the picture but in a much different way. As you

will see the sliders with a larger numbers display more “averaged” images

with less fine detail. Whereas the lower numbered sliders bring out more

fine detail (and sometime unwanted "noise"). Now play with some of the

layer-sliders to enhance your image to a desired effect. Press Reset to return

to the normal settings.

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.

Once you are happy with the appearance of your image you can save it as

a BMP, JPEG, TIFF or FITS file. Or you can “tweak” the image further on the

Final processing page.

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