Registax 5 beta is out.

If you do any planetary imaging, you probably know about a free program called Registax. If not, you better download it and try it.
Version 5 is out although still beta, I'm sure it works well. I've used it for years for stacking planet and lunar images. What is this 'stacking' thing? It is when you take a few hundred short exposures of a planet or lunar surface, save it as an .avi video file. When you play the file in a media player you see a video of the view you see through the scope. Unless you are very lucky to have stable skies, your image of Saturn may be bouncing around looking like a tossed water balloon jiggling. You'll see some brief peeks where it looks very sharp, but then the atmosphere distorts it again. Registax will go through the file, sort out the best images, line them up and stack them on top of each other forming a very sharp image.
Compare amateur stacked images with an 8 inch scope with the old Mt. Palomar 200 inch images. Ours our much better!

| Registax web page |