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AstroTux

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  1. James, as you know I've had your software sat on my machine for some time, but have not been able to test it until now :sad: !! I think I've learnt that testing astro-software in the field is not like any other software testing, you have to wait until everything is just right before you can begin . Well on Tuesday night the clouds were not around, all my stuff was easily to hand, nothing else needed adjusting or testing, I was in a comfortable environment at home, nobody expected me to do anything else, etc., etc., so I finally got down to it . What can I say? Having tried numerous other capture programmes under Linux, yours is easily the most instinctive to use - just look at the pictures, play with the sliders and away you go. Others such as wxAstrocapture and qastrocam-g2 have all the relevant features scattered under different tabs, which can lead to confusion when being used in a dark environment. I always used to find that I had forgotten to do something leading to the capture of loads of unusable data. No such problems with oaCapture. I was able to get useful data straight away using my SPC900 and the 'little scope' ( AstroMaster 130 ). My first target was Mars and the ability to run at a full 15 frames/sec allowed me to capture lots of information quite quickly, and to perform many runs at different settings - very useful. I then moved on to the full moon and using the focal reducer took just two runs of 600 frames at 10 frames/sec, one of the top half and the other of the bottom half. A quick bit of maths and you can see that I took just 2 minutes of moon data, but it was extremely easy. Then, on to the processing. Thankfully I didn't have to problem of loading .avi files into Registax ( V6.1.0.8 ) as I'd been through this with you and had installed the utVideo codec under Wine. I decided to start with the Lunar work as I was more confident of the results. This was where the work began!! I did not realise that oaCapture produces so much more data than other Linux capture programmes. Loading 600 frames at 640x480 into Registax, then aligning and stacking them took about 30 minutes on an AMD dual-core 64-bit machine running at 2.8GHz. However, more data is better in my mind. Just for you, here is the result - slightly out of focus, very crudely processed, then stitched together using Hugin........... 15th April 2014, 600 frames top half, 600 frames bottom half, SPC900 + 2x focal reducer, Celestron AstroMaster 130 As you can see I need to improve my astro-photography skills, but I'm quite happy with this as it was the result of a test. I just need to remember to use my cornflake packet Bhatinov mask next time. As I'm typing this my other system is chuntering away processing the Mars data, so hopefully something good may come out. Anyway, many thanks James for an excellently useable application. This is going to be my capture programme from now on. The only improvement I can suggest is support for the SPC900 LX mod . All the best, and keep up the good work, Alan
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