Sean Walker described its key functions in his review of version 3 in the December 2005 issue, page 94.
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RegiStax 6, available as a free download, is one of the most powerful and widely used programs for planetary imaging techniques including sorting, registering, stacking, and sharpening webcam images. Planetary Imaging 101: Selecting and Stacking
I frequently employ several different programs and planetary imaging to process my images, because no single program yet contains all the tools I find necessary. Careful image processing using the tools of the “digital darkroom” is every bit as important as acquiring high-quality webcam frames in the first place if you want to produce highly detailed and scientifically useful images. The primary goal of planetary imaging is to tease out as much fine detail as possible without introducing spurious artifacts. Sorting and stacking thousands of images manually would be about as much fun as undergoing root-canal surgery! Thankfully, there are computer programs available today that will do this job of planetary imaging automatically. And not every frame you record will be worth keeping, so before you stack images you need to weed out the blurry ones. It typically takes hundreds or thousands of webcam images stacked together to achieve an acceptable result.
But because signal increases directly with exposure, whereas noise increases only as the square root of exposure, you can stack lots of frames to produce an image with a much higher signal-to-noise ratio than that of any individual frame. Webcam frames are noisy when compared to those from cooled astronomical CCD cameras. This means that webcams can “beat the seeing” - with planetary imaging and capture sharp images during fleeting moments of atmospheric tranquility. The secret of the webcam’s success is that it can produce images with very short exposure times, perhaps one-tenth of the durations required with conventional cooled CCD cameras.
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This is due in large part to the simple, inexpensive webcam, which has enabled amateurs armed with modest telescopes to produce images of the planets that rival those captured with large professional instruments ( S&T: October 2005, page 115).
Over the past five years, a tremendous resurgence in amateur planetary astronomy has taken place. Author Don Parker created these stunning portraits of Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars using webcams, a 16-inch Newtonian telescope, and the techniques he describes here. But extracting the most detail from the raw images produced at the telescope takes patience and skill, not to mention the tools available today for your digital darkroom. Capturing the planets has become relatively easy, thanks to the webcam.
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