Creating Lunar Mosaic's with PixInsight

[slang]

Hi.

I've become a big fan of PI, and recently purchased it. (Love the new manual by the way...!) Not sure which forum to post this, but did search first.

My current imaging has mostly been lunar (will graduate to deep sky eventually...) and one of the reasons I purchased PI was that it can almost everything, and I love the tutorials and deconvolution.

I capture 1280x1024 mono images at present (and use avistack2 to stack and align ~100 frames or so per segment). I have had limited success in using PI to create a mosaic of the (normally 5) lunar segments. I did get it to work, and it was close enough for me to persist with.

With the StarAlignment tool (register/union mosaic) and tweaking the star detection details, I can get a lunar mosaic to stitch together. This is, however, not that helpful for a few reasons.
1) changing the details to get start detection working for lunar segments isn't that straight forward, different shots seem to require quite different settings, and it's not that straight forward
2) the seams are often detectable. Selecting Frame Adaption (and re-adding a particular segment) seems to help a bit, but the seams are still straight lines and are sometimes still visible. Other software (MS ICE for example) will stitch around features, which for lunar images kind of makes good sense.

In my searching, I stumbled across this post: http://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=874.0
It refers to (under upcoming projects) FFTAlignment as being good for Lunar/non astronomical. I can't see any reference to this in PI 1.6.1.625.

Does FFTAlignment exist yet?
Is it possible to have the actual seam stitch around features/craters etc., and not through them?
Is there a better way of doing this with PI?

Anway, thanx for a great product...

[Carlos Milovic]

Hi

I think that you should try the FFT registration script. The rotation and scaling algorithm are not too robust, but it may help. Also I wrote FFTRegistration, as a module, to perform translations, but it was aimed to align frames with large matching zones, not mozaicing...

[slang]

Hey Carlos.

I think that you should try the FFT registration script. The rotation and scaling algorithm are not too robust, but it may help. Also I wrote FFTRegistration, as a module, to perform translations, but it was aimed to align frames with large matching zones, not mozaicing...

Thanks for that. I've been trying the fftregistration script on and off for a little while - I'm still interested in being able to use PI for everything.

Unfortunately, whenever I try the script, I get an error like;

Rotate 44.961 deg, Bicubic Spline Interpolation, c=0.30: 100%
*** Error [000]: C:/PCL/src/scripts/FFTRegistration.js, line 521: At address 008EC4EA with exception code C0000005 :

or

*** Applying translation:
Translate dx=623.012, dy=94.684, Bicubic Spline Interpolation, c=0.30: 100%
*** Error [000]: C:/PCL/src/scripts/FFTRegistration.js, line 241: At address 008EC4EA with exception code C0000005 :

Unfortunately, I'm not familiar enough with PCL (etc) or your fftregistration script to diagnose this any further.

I haven't yet downloaded/used the fftregistration module.