Ballard Loc: Grass Valley, California

Last week I took a video of the Crater Copernicus at 8000mm. I stacked the video images in the freeware program "Autostakket" to reduce the atmospheric turbulence in the image. This is the result. Note: I also increased the saturation a lot to bring out the subtle orange colors in the mountain peaks a blues in the planes. (To the naked eye it appears pretty much black and white). All comments suggestions and questions are welcome.

(Download)

PixelStan77 Loc: Vermont/Chicago

Very interesting concept of capture. Superb Job!
Wish I lived closer to you. I could learn alot!

Ballard Loc: Grass Valley, California

Hi PixelStan77
Thanks for checking out the photo. Using video works well for this type of image, but does create a 9x16 aspect ratio that needs to be cropped for printing on standard paper sizes.

bpulv Loc: Buena Park, CA

Are you sure you didn't use a NASA telescope!!!!! What kind of 8000mm lens did you use or was it a telescope? Can you please describe your setup?

Ballard Loc: Grass Valley, California

Hi bpuly
For this image I used a 16inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope with a barlow lens attached to increase the focal length to ~8000mm. The scope was mounted on a Astrophysics 1600 GTO equatorial mount. The video was taken with a canon 5D markIV DSLR in 4K video mode for just over 1 minute. The canon EOS movie utility that comes with the camera was used to covert the mov files to a bunch of tif files that were then stacked with the 64 bit version of AutoStakket. I stacked the best 20% of the images from the video (~500 images). The images where drizzled 3X in AutoStakket producing a very large tif image (~400meg). After a bit of unsharp masking and increasing the color saturation I reduced the image back down to a more transmittable size and turned it into a jpeg.

bpulv Loc: Buena Park, CA

Just the kind of equipment everyone would have lying around the house! Great shot!