MOON 02 Mar '17

[Sierra Golf Mike]

Another attempt at the moon, a stacked video from 02 Mar 17. Taking the photos/videos is the easy part!!!!! Please tell me I'm getting better or at least what I need to do to improve. 

[johnfosteruk]

Looking good mate. Did you use Pipp to crop and align?

[Sierra Golf Mike]

25 minutes ago, johnfosteruk said:

Looking good mate. Did you use Pipp to crop and align?

Thanks, I did use Pipp to crop but wasn't too sure about the align. I tried to stack some stills earlier on and ended up with a mess. How do you align single shots using Pipp?

[johnfosteruk]

You drop them all in the first tab and tick full disk. Then on the processing tab, set the enable cropping section to the appropriate size. Click test options up in the top right corner to confirm it's behaving and you've got the right size.

[Knighty2112]

Very nice. Not an imager, so can't offer any advice for improvements, but as a visual astronomer only it looks very good? Well done!  

[Sierra Golf Mike]

4 minutes ago, Knighty2112 said:

Very nice. Not an imager, so can't offer any advice for improvements, but as a visual astronomer only it looks very good? Well done!  

Thanks Gus!

[Sierra Golf Mike]

1 hour ago, johnfosteruk said:

You drop them all in the first tab and tick full disk. Then on the processing tab, set the enable cropping section to the appropriate size. Click test options up in the top right corner to confirm it's behaving and you've got the right size.

Thanks for that John, I'll give it a go. It's a very steep learning curve!

[Scooot]

Looks great to me, nice crescent. 

[Sierra Golf Mike]

40 minutes ago, Scooot said:

Looks great to me, nice crescent. 

Thanks Richard.

[nightfisher]

10 hours ago, Sierra Golf Mike said:

Thanks for that John, I'll give it a go. It's a very steep learning curve!

Yes its a steep learning curve, but it does click into place after a fairly short while, it did with me and i am a thick wagon driver

Yes its getting better, pretty good image, always room to improve, the one thing that would greatly help is a motor drive mount forget the AZ3 for imaging use the EQ3 and get a motor drive set for it, once you have tracking it all gets so much easier, lots of single frames with the tracking holding object in the camera`s field of view, makes it much better for pipp and registax, i have tried stacking single frames from AZ mount and it turns into a total dogs diner

this image was taken with 102 on EQ5 with dec and ra motors, 21 frames 1000D and then pipp and registax, still room to improve, focus could have been a tad sharper and i should have got more frames

[Sierra Golf Mike]

Another attempt from the same session, this time I stacked a few stills in AutoStakkert but for some reason I could not get anything useful from wavelets, even 25% on layer one was too much! So minimal levels in Photoshop and a bit of sharpening, I think it's better than the one above, much brighter and I was losing detail!

[Sierra Golf Mike]

1 hour ago, nightfisher said:

Yes its a steep learning curve, but it does click into place after a fairly short while, it did with me and i am a thick wagon driver

Yes its getting better, pretty good image, always room to improve, the one thing that would greatly help is a motor drive mount forget the AZ3 for imaging use the EQ3 and get a motor drive set for it, once you have tracking it all gets so much easier, lots of single frames with the tracking holding object in the camera`s field of view, makes it much better for pipp and registax, i have tried stacking single frames from AZ mount and it turns into a total dogs diner

this image was taken with 102 on EQ5 with dec and ra motors, 21 frames 1000D and then pipp and registax, still room to improve, focus could have been a tad sharper and i should have got more frames

Nice image Jules, I have the motor set on my EQ3-2 mount but need to get it better aligned. Can't do drift alignment where I am, just need to persevere with the polar alignment.

[nightfisher]

27 minutes ago, Sierra Golf Mike said:

Nice image Jules, I have the motor set on my EQ3-2 mount but need to get it better aligned. Can't do drift alignment where I am, just need to persevere with the polar alignment.

Steve, no need to get hung up about polar align, here is my little tip, locate Polaris, plonk the mount down with north leg roughly in right direction, i just sight from behind the mount axis, yes you will get better results doing it properly but my method works okay, take a few frames and see if the image is drifting, if not carry on shooting frames, on your camera better to have exposure slightly on the dark side

[Sierra Golf Mike]

3 minutes ago, nightfisher said:

Steve, no need to get hung up about polar align, here is my little tip, locate Polaris, plonk the mount down with north leg roughly in right direction, i just sight from behind the mount axis, yes you will get better results doing it properly but my method works okay, take a few frames and see if the image is drifting, if not carry on shooting frames, on your camera better to have exposure slightly on the dark side

Thanks Jules. next time we get clear skies, I'll give it a go.

[nightfisher]

You will get there, and the 102 is a GREAT Luna scope, im on my second one, and now have battery less servo drive to the focus knob, i much prefer the Mak over the 120ED for Luna imaging