My first astrovideo.

[moonomaly]

Finally managed to see something through the Bresser CCD, recorded my first footage of the Moon

I was battling with wind, a crappy tripod and a broken off pan-handle so forgive the wobble please !

https://www.dropbox.com/s/kydegcjeacpl22j/20170109202328.avi?dl=0

Through a Celestron 70 travel scope (400mm), a 2x Barlow and a Bresser CCD.

 

Cheers, Gary.

 

[bomberbaz]

If you stacked the first 3 seconds of the video it would make a decent composite. 

[moonomaly]

Nice one i'll give that a go, what software would you recommend for stacking (i think i can extract the frames with VLC) ?

 

[bomberbaz]

I used registax myself. Easy to use and lots of ways of playing with the results

[moonomaly]

Thansk i'll try that, just tried deepskystacker but it couldn't find stars as reference points.

[Radec]

DSS is not used for videos like yours - it's really for deep sky long exposure frames.

you could try Autostakkert or Registax6 - both free.

Hope this helps

[moonomaly]

Thanks Radec, i guess the clue's in the name 'deep sky' ha!

I tried Registax for a couple of hours but it repeatedly only pulled 1 frame from the 100 or so that make up the first 4 seconds.

All in good time

 

[furrysocks2]

I'm by no means experienced in any of this, so I'd consider my efforts little more than fat-fingering in PIPP and AS!2.

I downloaded your video and used PIPP to set a region of interest to extract a 512x512 video of the right-hand side of the disc giving a somewhat stabilised output video. Then I ran it back through PIPP to create another output video containing only the first 150 frames. If I knew how to edit avis to cut out the poor sections, there's probably at least twice that of useable footage, but I just wanted to see what I could get doing a quickie on it.

I put the cropped and shortened video into Autostakkert!2 and I think used 75% of the frames - it shows you a quality graph so you can choose how much to use. Finally, a single unsharp mask in Gimp and got this image out...

It's perhaps a little too far processed - craters and mountains look unnaturally high in relief to me if I over-process.

Regarding capture - wind is a killer, if you don't have a tracking mount like me then the moon drifts out of view and you either have to limit video length or settle for an area of interest which is visible throughout the video.

 

Great start, good luck with the next one and with learning the software processing tool chains. Be sure to let us see what you get out.

Matt.

[moonomaly]

Thanks furrysocks!

On another note, i tried out the sky view app for android and it showed the Moon as being in completely the opposite direction from where it was yesterday. I did the old figure-of-eight phone shke to calibrate it but no joy. So then i got the Stellarium app but i couldn't get that to look up and down.

I then got Stellarium for the Pc and that was telling me the Moon was in the opposite direction from what it was!

So i got a magnet, got my pole-checker to see which was North and then checked my compass with that, all good.

What could be causing every app/program i try to be showing the Moon as being positioned 180 degrees off?

 

[furrysocks2]

16 minutes ago, moonomaly said:

Thanks furrysocks!

On another note, i tried out the sky view app for android and it showed the Moon as being in completely the opposite direction from where it was yesterday. I did the old figure-of-eight phone shke to calibrate it but no joy. So then i got the Stellarium app but i couldn't get that to look up and down.

I then got Stellarium for the Pc and that was telling me the Moon was in the opposite direction from what it was!

So i got a magnet, got my pole-checker to see which was North and then checked my compass with that, all good.

What could be causing every app/program i try to be showing the Moon as being positioned 180 degrees off?

 

Have you correctly entered your latitude and longitude? Google maps can give it to you.

[furrysocks2]

19 minutes ago, moonomaly said:

... it showed the Moon as being in completely the opposite direction from where it was yesterday.

Same time of day?

[moonomaly]

Thanks, yes time/long/lat all good.

I do sometimes miss the blindingly obvious but can't think what it could be here.