COVID19 forced many of us to find something to fill our time. Years ago I gave up my amateur astronomy about the time I first typed “JFK” into an internet browser. So I cleaned about 20+ years of dust from my telescope curious to see if I could make a cellphone adapter to capture pictures and video through the eyepiece. Fortunately, I was able to buy a cheap adapter from Amazon perfect for my needs.
To process video today’s astronomers use a process of “frame stacking” to counter, to some extent, the blurring effect of atmospheric turbulence. For lunar work it is typical to capture thousands of frames and let software sort them by a quality estimation. Depending on the amount of turbulence one may take few to many of the best frames to stack with 16 bit dynamic range. Final processing will include some sharpening and tone adjustments. I spend most of a day processing a single night’s video. Pretty cool, and there are popular freeware programs to accomplish this magic.
I wondered if this process would be helpful with the Darnell doorway frames. I used 20 frames and processed, for example below, the best 15 frames. Stacking is designed for static scenes such as the moon. So for the Darnell frames portions that are static will stack, while people in motion will be blurred. The two figures I was interested in enhancing are Mr. Frazier and the shadowy so called “Prayer Man”.
For Mr. Frazier it is clear to me that he was wearing sunglasses (or eye patch), an unexpected find as I’ve never seen an enhancement showing this.
For Prayer Man I think there is some hint of facial features (compared with single frames), but still too blurry for identification, in my opinion. There is a hint of the vertical tie-like feature I’ve noted in previous postings after viewing the Sixth Floor Museum’s excellent Darnell video. I was allowed to make a trace of a single screen capture printout (which was afterward destroyed by the SFM). The attached GIF overlays that tracing with the processed 15 frame stack.
