stepping beyond Loc: usa eastcoast

Lunacy from the Carolinas.

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CraigFair Loc: Santa Maria, CA.

Great job Stepping.
Craig

stepping beyond Loc: usa eastcoast

Thanks Craig , I've worked on my focus since these were taken almost a year or so ago. A bahtinov mask makes all the difference when you have focus issues, or I just forget to check the collimation on any given night.

Oknoder Loc: Western North Dakota

These are great, especially single frames. Have you tried capturing video or a large series of images and then focus stacking, with something like Registax? This technique is supposed to work very well though I have only tried a couple of times with mixed results.

Matthew

CraigFair Loc: Santa Maria, CA.

Thanks for the idea of taking Videos and using Registax.
What format does it stack to, JPEG or TIFF???
Craig

Oknoder Loc: Western North Dakota

If shooting video through a DSLR the best possible resolution that you can achieve is through a raw capture of the live view screen. I have used backyard Nikon to be able to grab the frames right off of the Live View read out. I cannot say I understand all the technical jargon of why this is the better technique but I am pretty sure that has to do with the camera compressing the file before it saves to the memory card or computer, so that way you end up with pure raw data. I do not do a whole lot of planetary imaging but the difference this one simple trick of recording the data yields far superior results. Unsure if other programs offer this feature, I am fairly sure there would have to be others.

Matthew

CraigFair Loc: Santa Maria, CA.

My DSLR shoots in the .MOV file and I would have to convert it to .AVI.
Which I'm sure would degrade it some.
Craig

stepping beyond Loc: usa eastcoast

I'm coming in a lil' late on this but, if yall could save your raw in FITS and then stack the single images in DSS or a highend software : Ps, pixI , maximDL etc. you could save your data better than if you converted and stacked with a jpeg conversion. As far a AS2 and reg6 goes Tiff formated avi is what you should be using and then convert the final image for posting. I don't use DSLR cameras for astronomy so I guess the same would apply since data from a dslr is superior to some webcams. I just don't know how much better a dslr would be than my SSUEll 1/4 in.cmos or T510NG COLOR 1/2.5 in. cmos made for astronomy because I don't have one for astronomy. I can spectulate that it's better and even better if the camera is modded for low light sensitivity or made for a telescope. I've viewed what others have done doing Afocal and prime focus and the results are much better in dso's if modded.Software can only do so much and then it becomes overprocessed "which I tend to do alot". That's just my 2 cents.

nikonshooter Loc: Spartanburg, South Carolina

Well done!