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Mercury in IR on 26th April
Tele Vue 5x Powermate
Baader IR-pass filter (685 nm)
ZWO ASI174MM mono camera
Mercury imaged fairly early in the morning before the Sun's heat disturbed the local seeing too severely. There was no breeze, so a small region of interest could be selected, allowing nearly 500,000 frames to be captured in about 40 minutes of observation. Images processed by frame selection in software showed the main features, but the images shown above are the result of a mix of software and manual frame selection. The raw data was processed initially using PIPP then Autostakkert! to produce stacks with various percentages of frames. These were analysed using Registax, and the final frame selection was from the 12 videos that were consistently identified by Registax as giving the best-quality stacks. The result is noticeably better than the software-only version.