Unable to stack moon shot in AS!2

[Kakadush]

Hello . 

A friend of mine shot two nice 30 sec videos of the moon using his Cannon DSLR and asked me to stack it , the video's were in MOV format and i converted them to AVI using PIPP.
The first image turned out nicely as seen here : 

The issue is when i tried to stack the second photo the results were bad and what's weird is that i tried it twice with the exact same settings in AS!2 (which were used in the image that turned out well) and the results were different: 


Any ideas ? Thanks ! 

Dan.

[Steve Ward]

My guess would be that the 'scope is on a non-tracking mount and the Moon was captured as it drifted through the field of view ... ?

You first want to adjust the camera settings until you have a slightly 'under-exposed' image being captured , you cannot adjust down a saturated shot afterwards but a dark image can always be tweaked.

When you run the capture through PIPP  (the latest version)  you get an option to use a brilliant new feature that allows the program to track prominent surface features such as craters or sunspots.

When you've loaded your file select the Solar/Lunar Close-up option.

In the Processing section select the Surface Feature option and the Enable Surface Stabilisation box.

Now tick the Enable Area of Interest box.

When the preview image opens you need to expand the Blue AOI box to cover the Moon and form a Crop region , PIPP will only use the frames where this region is on the chip so the frames in your second image that have wandered off to the right will be ignored.

Now expand and drag the Red box over a prominent crater that PIPP will use as a point of reference to align to .

Now select your Quality and Output parameters as usual and then Process.

Hope this helps ... 

[Cornelius Varley]

A little more info would be helpful.  Knowing more of the technique used to capture the video will help pin down the problem. If your friend shot the image I assume the camera was simply mounted on a tripod. If this is the case the stacking software might have problems trying to align frames that are substantially different to each other, hence pics 2 and 3

[Steve Ward]

If the camera were simply mounted on a tripod then it must have been an extremely long focal length lens attached to get that image scale ... !

To get a full disc nicely framed on DSLR chip I run my Tal 100RS + 1.4x Barlow , or 1400mm FL , to get the scale above I'd be running around 2500mm FL ... 

[Kakadush]

My guess would be that the 'scope is on a non-tracking mount and the Moon was captured as it drifted through the field of view ... ?

You first want to adjust the camera settings until you have a slightly 'under-exposed' image being captured , you cannot adjust down a saturated shot afterwards but a dark image can always be tweaked.

When you run the capture through PIPP  (the latest version)  you get an option to use a brilliant new feature that allows the program to track prominent surface features such as craters or sunspots.

When you've loaded your file select the Solar/Lunar Close-up option.

In the Processing section select the Surface Feature option and the Enable Surface Stabilisation box.

Now tick the Enable Area of Interest box.

When the preview image opens you need to expand the Blue AOI box to cover the Moon and form a Crop region , PIPP will only use the frames where this region is on the chip so the frames in your second image that have wandered off to the right will be ignored.

Now expand and drag the Red box over a prominent crater that PIPP will use as a point of reference to align to .

Now select your Quality and Output parameters as usual and then Process.

Hope this helps ...  

What a great solution thanks a lot Steve i mostly use PIPP for debayer and cropping i never knew it had such amazing functions for lunar \ solar close up's ! it worked perfectly , cheers ! 

Dan. 

[Steve Ward]

You're very welcome ... all thanks go to Chris Garry for adding that wonderful feature ...