How long should my moon Video be ?

[johnb]

Hi

Im starting to look at moon imaging using my Skywatcher 250 on an EQ6 with my Guiding Camera which is a QHYII

Im, using Sharcap and really want to know how long my video captures should be, I have good alignment

 

Regards

John B

 

 

[Dinglem]

I'm no expert but I wouldn't have thought it would matter how long they are, I personally would only do 1 minute and take loads of them, that way you won't have big files and long videos to go through when processing them. I'm sure you will get lots of conflicting advice but at the end of the day it's what suits you.

[Pete Presland]

I guess it depends on the conditions. If the seeing is variable, you might need more than on a good night. I normally stack a minimum of approx 700, probably out of at least a few thousand. There is an equation for the signal to noise ration, but maths was never my strong point.

[johnb]

ahh penny droped I think - its not video length that important but more about the number of frames captured

 

 

[furrysocks2]

When I'm imaging the moon, the seeing is typically quite variable - looking over rooftops doesn't help.

Keep an eye on the preview or splitting the captures up into shorter files as suggested above... if you've got particularly bad seeing during a capture, might be worth discarding and trying for better seeing. In particular, if you're able to capture at very high frame rates, you can generate very large volumes of rubbish and capturing over a longer "duration" therefore gives you a better chance of hitting a quiet spell. You're after as many frames of good seeing as possible. Software will rank them and let you stack the N% best frames, but it starts with capture.

That's how I look at it.