First attempt at MOON MOSAIC with webcam

[prbaxter]

taken with spc900 webcam

stacked in Registax

Baxter

[beamish]

fantastic for a 1st attempt !!

[lukebl]

Great result! You must be pleased with that. How many frames in the mosaic?

[prbaxter]

I'm quite chuffed.

there are 5 images stitched together.

each image is between 40 and 200 stacked images from avi depending on video quality of each video.

Baxter

[Sierra Golf Mike]

Baxter,

Great image, I have the same kit as you and have tried to capture the moon via my SPC900 (SPC880 Flashed) so far will no success. I do not have any motor drive, do you? So if you don't mind, could you talk me through your process, ie do you manually track part of the moon to capture the image then move to the next, process each in registax then stitch?

[prbaxter]

no motor drive. no tracking.

just take a video of the moon, passing through the field of view and then spend ages in registax trying to get the best image from it. I found using the simplest of allignment and reducing the number of alligned images works best (Limit).

Photoshop is best tool for merging photos, but you can probably do it in other apps.

[jgs001]

Nicely done. Getting a motor drive will mean you can capture more frames, and use more. This will help with the end result. iMerge is pretty good at making the mosaic, and can handle the AVI's, so you can make sure you don't miss any bits. Not too bad if you're only doing one strip, but when you're doing more strips, it gets very important.

[prbaxter]

yeah I should have a motor drive in time for the full moon at which point I will attempt to do a full moon mosaic with loads of detail and greater zoom.

I'll have a look at iMerge, thanks.

[GazOC]

Thats a great result for an untracked set up.

Try popping the finished image back into Registax and have a little play with the bottom 2 or 3 wavelets.

[SeedyF]

Now that is good for a first attempt and without any drives! And we have the same kit too!!

I have only done a couple of mosaics but the one I just posted maybe shows you can get a sharper end result with tracking - I did mine with 1200 frames each pane and registax was limiting the final stack to about 100 frames for each pane.

[stevelcfc]

Thats a gret picture. Looks like iv'e got the same set up

What program did you use to stitch them together? Its something i want to have a go at, if the clouds stay away long enough

steve

Sorry, just read the other posts

[Steve 1962]

I'm quite chuffed.

..and so you should be chuffed - I think that's great.

Very well done

Regards

Steve

[prbaxter]

for those of you who have the same kit, here is a sample of one of the AVI's I recorded before stacking - to give you some idea of what I was working with.

You cannot stack all frames but you have a good few hundred to play with. manual tracking was not possible due to the vibrations caused as a result of touching the rig. No barlow was used.

Here is a sample of the mosaic during processing and rotated as it should be:

[wpitcairn]

Thanks for the pics, its is also great to get the full process of how you achieved this. This will certainly help me when I get my new webcam connected up.

[prbaxter]

yeah a useful note, is you line your webcam up correctly, you shouldn't need to rotate the image afterwards. One less processing step with a little care.