just for fun - first star trail attempt - QHY5 on 9x50 finderscope...

[Russe]

Hi guys,

this was just for fun - my guiding setup gave up on me, so I had the finderguider disassembled - exchanged and tightened screws etc.

While looking out the window I saw a few sparkling stars and remembered that I always wanted to see how to do startrails. So I opened the window, leaned the finder guider out of it and hooked my guidecam up to the comp and shot 100x 30s exposures.

what I'm a bit bewildered about is, that I have gaps inbetween the trails even though I had left no pauses between the exposures. I suppose it's the time it takes to load the FITS files to the comp and the quite large magnification b/o the rather small chip.

Well anyway. Here's my attempt: (don't laugh too hard...)

[LukeSkywatcher]

Attempting star trails is fun. If you want a bit of help and make things easier, you could download this:

http://www.startrails.de/html/software.html

Its pretty self-explaining and takes all the hard work out of it.

Your image is magnified and cropped after you took the image(s)?. If so, then less magnification and cropping and the image shouldnt look so much like morse code.

But dont quote me. I'm not expert on imaging.

[Leveye]

If you have noise reduction turned on that will put gaps between shots as it is processing in between each picture but that's only in the case of using a DSLR.

[Russe]

my image wasn't magnified - it's really just the Qhy5 on a 9x50 finderscope... (fl = 180mm - probably less)

[Russe]

If you have noise reduction turned on that will put gaps between shots as it is processing in between each picture but that's only in the case of using a DSLR.

oh - noise reduction in the qhy5? I have to look for that - I really have never used that old second hand camera for imaging I must say - only for PHP - and there it does what it should.

[glowingturnip]

startrails and starstax both have software routines for filling in the gaps, you could try those.  They tend to do funny things to terrestrial backgrounds, but you don't have any here, so it might work 

[Russe]

In comparison - if I don't choose the blend option in startrails, it really looks like morse code ... lol...