Moon 15/01/13

[cstew]

Well this is my first attempt at imaging the moon through my scope, I took a few pics with my old Sony DSLR and a 200mm lens, but this is with a Canon 1100d attached using a t-ring and a barlow (simply to allow me to focus) It is a single picture, just tweaked and sharpened a little. I did try taking a video to have a go at stacking, even tried stacking a series of single frames, using registax, but can't get my head around it just yet!!

Not great, but it's a start. ISO 200, 1/10s. Really need to find some time to sit and figure out registax, main problem is getting the video files into the right format, as the canon outputs a less than ideal MOV file, then need to figure out PIPP to get things centred as I currently have no tracking, it's all part of the "fun" of astronomy I guess!

[cgarry]

I think that is good for a single image. If you stack 100 or so images like that and apply some wavelets then you should have a great image.

For my lunar images I stack raw images from my 450D, not video. But then again the 450D does not have a video function! So long as the moon is completely on the frame, PIPP should happily take the raw files from your Canon, do all the centring and output TIFF frames ready to run through Registax.

Cheers,

Chris

[JamesF]

I wanted to get a shot of the Moon last night but the clouds had other ideas

I'll second Chris's comments. Lots of stacked stills will really help. From memory for the moon I use 1/1000th @ ISO400, but you may need to experiment. If you look at the histogram you really don't want it more than 75% full.

James

[cstew]

Hmmm, so I figured out PIPP & registax, tried stacking a series of single frames first, not great, only had 16 to use, then finally found a video format that worked and managed to get 480 frames out of it to process through registax, still not great, this is what I ended up with:

To be honest it doesn't seem much different to the single frame, apart from the brightness/contrast. Now I'm a complete novice in registax, and there is a bewildering array of settings, I looked at a few tutorials I found kicking around, but they didn't seem to help me pull out much more detail. The process can clearly produce stunning images as demonstrated on this website, but I'll be buggered if ti can do it in my hands as yet!!

[JamesF]

Registax does take a few goes to get the hang of, certainly. Keep practising and you'll get there.

It's possible someone on SGL has a good tutorial. Might be worth starting a new thread asking the question?

James

[Steve Ward]

Try Roger's Solar tutorial . . .

The Registax side of things applies to Lunar shooting too . . . great place to start . .

Steve.

( here's what I got stacking 90 frames last night . . )

[cstew]

Another attempt, slightly better this time.

[stem1989]

nice