AstroBKK
Mars geography and impact of treatments
Mars's surface features
The picture above was taken in October 2020, at the end of Thai's rain season. Seeing was far from optimal. Nevertheless, some characteristics could be detected on the surface. How treatment impact on these features?
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Stack size
The image from 30% frames stacked is clearly more noisy than the one from 70%, this is well noticeable on smooth areas such as Elysium or Utopia Planitias. Surface features seems slightly less sharp when more frames were stacked, but this effect is much less obvious than the noise reduction. The 50% stack image will be used for next test.
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Enlarging methods
A drizzle function is included in Autostakkert!. Considering the jaw-dropping results obtained with their Denoise AI utility, I wondered how Gigapixel AI would compare with the classic drizzling in AS!, as Gigapixel utility comes with denoise and blur removal tools.
Below are two image from the same stack, enlarged by two methods, AS! drizzle + Gigapixel AI, and Gigapixel only, both having a total 2.25 enlargement factor. Note that the Gigapixel AI parameters used for enlargement in combination with AS! drizzling or alone where different, with the objective to optimize results in both cases (using the same GP parameters gave much noisier picture for the image drizzled then enlarged with GP than purely enlarged with GP).
Contrary to the effect of stack size on definition, the result here is obvious, the image enlarged using GP only shows much well defined and sharper features than the one obtained combining both methods. Fine details such as Herschel Crater are almost not discernable in the method involving AS! drizzle function. A more straightforward comparison with GP and AS! drizzle at 3x will be performed later.