Use of Registax and LiMovie for the Reduction of Marginal Occultations Tony George Umatilla, Oregon

Low light video cameras such as the Supercircuits PC164C and Watec WAT 902H series cameras allow observers to record occultations at the very limit of detectability

The problem comes when we try to reduce the data from these very low brightness events, sometimes the target star is not visible on the video monitor and sometimes in LiMovie we cannot see the target star to affix an aperture to measure the brightness

To avoid this problem, some observers use integrating cameras such as: WAT 120N and Astrovid Stellacam Lumenera SKYnyx2-0 SBIG STV

These are great cameras but there are a couple of problems At the maximum frame rate, they may not be as sensitive as the non-integrating cameras If you select an integration rate that is too long, you lose time resolution in your data

One solution to this problem is to use the non-integrating CCD video camera and then integrate the video after recording. This allows you to extract just enough of the signal to detect the event (or confirm a negative event), but no more than is necessary to avoid unnecessary loss of time resolution

So how do you do this? Registax to the rescue…

Videos can be easily and quickly integrated with Registax without any loss of video integrity and only the minimum required for time resolution

Integration can be done in four simple steps

We can take LiMovie data that looks like this…. Is there an occultation in this raw data?

And turn it into data that looks like this This was done with an 11-frame integration from raw data This was done with a 5-frame integration from raw data

We can extract data from videos where wind vibration is excessive…

If there is a bright star in the field, a pre- registration can be done in six simple steps Do not Optimize Press Save to create a Registered file

Here is a raw shaky image…

LiMovie cannot reliably track the faint star in the raw data…it is hard to tell what is happening to the faint star

Pre-registering so the target star is steady and can be analyzed with LiMovie…

In the registered file, LiMovie tracks the faint star, even right next to the bright star – and we have data on both stars. If the faint star was the one occulted, we would now have good data.

Detailed procedures for using Registax for preprocessing videos for subsequent analysis by LiMovie are contained here:

LiMovie, coupled with Registax can prove to be a very powerful combination – one that can greatly extend the events we can detect and report