Electronically Assisted Astronomy with a Jetson Nano

Hello,

no tests with my system because of the bad sky but i can use my work to enhance some of my astrophotography.

This time, we go on the Moon.

Of course, my equipment is a bit different :

Real time treatment (using Python and PyCuda with Nvidia GPU) can be use with old captures.

I made a test on the Moon (Gassendi crater region).

You can see how filters can improve video quality here :

To make a great picture of the Moon, we have to make a video of the Moon (raw video, no compression), sort the frames depending of their quality, stack the best frames (to remove noise), and apply wavelet filtering to retrieve details and sharpness.

Here is an example of what we can get without and with preliminary filtering (using PyCuda) :

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Preliminary filtering can bring very useful improvement of sensor rendering and CUDA programming is a perfect way to manage such heavy process.

Sensors are getting better and better but they are very expansive (some camera can cost 5000-10000$) so image processing with powerful GPU like NVidia GPUs is a must have.

There is a lot of things we can do with image processing and even amateur can make science.

I have worked for long years on the colours of the Moon. Yes, the Moon gets colours but they are very tiny. We have to catch them with a lot of computer treatments.

Here is what mineral Moon looks like (one of my best Moon picture) :

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Blue colour comes from titanium oxides, red colour comes from iron oxides, green can come from Olivine etc. Those are the true colours but strongly enhanced. It took me years to get such results (the original picture is about 100Mpx).

With appropriate filtering, maybe i will be able to make videos of the colours of the Moon. I will try to work on that a bit later.

Well, i hope this was interesting you.

That’s all for now.

Alain