First image

[EagleC]

A few days ago the sky was beautifully clear so I went out to see what I could see with a pair of old binoculars and a few iPad stargazing apps. I pointed the bins at the 7 sisters, my daughter went for the moon and exclaimed at how bright it was.

Later that evening I could not resist a daft experiment. I took my camcorder on a standard tripod, pointed it at the moon, zoomed in to 50x and when it focused carefully passed the photo button and got this, stunned that it worked at all!

When I get my scope I am hoping to improve on this

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[ScottS]

Good ol' Moon. Never fails to disappoint.

[Sandancer10]

Welcome to SGL and that's not a bad image.  You of course will be well and truly hooked now that you have tried to capture the moon.  I used a dedicated Philips webcam last night and it surprising just what it can do.

Happy Stargazing

Brenda

[frugal]

That is a cracking shot for a first photo.

Given that you have a camcorder you might want to take a video of the moon for a minute or so and then get a program like Registax to combine the best frames into a single high quality image.

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[wxsatuser]

Not to bad for a first go, better than my attempts with a point and shoot.

[ollypenrice]

I'd also try a video capture stacked and sharpened in Registax. (It's free.)

Olly

[EagleC]

Definitely going to try that, thanks. I only heard about stacking shots yesterday so thanks for the info on the software!

[Velvet]

well done there for a first, slippery slope now of late nights and a cowering credit card in the corner

[EagleC]

I took. 30 second video and have since been trying to get some useable results from registax.

First problem is the camcorder uses avchd, saved as .mts files. Registax doesn't accept these. Virtual dub doesn't either. I used movie maker to convert to mp4 then an avi converter to xvid avi... Still no joy so converted to mpeg2, still no joy, then another app to get to mpg1. Finally the 40mb vid occasionally loads.

The video was a little shaker for the first and last second so I trimmed that off.

Then on registax 6.1 it was a fight lasting over 12 hours and the end result was awful, it had not aligned properly. Further attempts met with the interface intermittently freezing. I gave up and tried registax 5.1 with a 2 second clip which was better but the end result was no better than the still. I am now battling v5.1 with the 40mb file, right now i think its crashed, or maybe its processing...

I know it's going to take time to get the best results but his software is unusably unstable. Any alternative apps I could use instead?

[frugal]

There was a recent thread where someone else was trying to process AVCHD. The author of PIPP read it and updated PIPP to cope with AVCHD.

If you use PIPP to preprocess the video it will crop, centre and re-encode the video to make it easier for Registax.

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[sidelight]

You could try autostakkert!2 http://www.autostakkert.com, my experiences have been mixed but I have found it will often process when Registax decides to curl up in a heap.

Cheers

Ross

[baggywrinkle]

Welcome to SGL

Nice first go on imaging.

[EagleC]

There was a recent thread where someone else was trying to process AVCHD. The author of PIPP read it and updated PIPP to cope with AVCHD.

If you use PIPP to preprocess the video it will crop, centre and re-encode the video to make it easier for Registax.

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This helped a lot, PIPP gave me a raw video which Registax 6 accepted once I'd reduced the processors to 1 I was able to process it on the 4th or 5th attempt.

I still don't really know what I'm doing but I got this:-

which I think is an improvement on the original snap.

[frugal]

That's a cracking photo.

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