Hackszine.com: Improving astronomical video using VirtualDub

Improving astronomical video using VirtualDub

YouTube user kwakhed23 pushed out this video showing before and after imagery of the Moon. In the "before" part of the video, you can see the effects of the atmosphere warping the Moon's image as it passes over the frame. In the "after" video, a temporal noise reduction filter is applied using the open source video tool VirtualDub. It's difficult to tell for sure in the YouTube compressed video, but it appears to have cleaned up the image nicely.

i thought this might be useful to other amateur astronomers who use the "mount the camera on a tripod and point it at the eyepiece" technique. you should be able to get much more detail this way.

I've used VirtualDub for deinterlacing and other random video cleanup projects before, and it's a very handy tool. I'm not certain exactly which filter is being used by kwakhed23, but in addition to the built-ins, you can check out Donald Graft's site for numerous other contributed filters which might be worth playing around with.

Better Astronomical Images Via Filtering
VirtualDub
Donald Graft's Collection of VirtualDub Filters

Posted by Jason Striegel | Apr 28, 2008 09:27 PM
Astronomy, Video | Permalink | Comments (0)