Tuesday 21 May 2013

Another Moon (...with the galileoscope).

Went out last night with the webcam and my galileoscope to take some video of the moon.
Was battling a thin layer of cloud the whole time that was getting thicker as time progressed so most of my videos turned out rather useless but that's not a big deal.

Thing is, I think I'm finally getting the hang of the settings in Registax.
Those of you who are familiar with the galileoscope know that its gets mounted on a standard camera tripod and is a right pain in the ass to aim so what I did was I pointed the scope in the right direction and let the moon drift into the fov and than out the other side.

Usually when I do this and process the video in Registax I end up with nasty sharp lines all over the place.
I have since discovered Autostakkert which seems to work a little better for certain videos but in this case I couldn't work out how to use Autostakkert when the video started off with nothing in it (totally black) so I went back to Registax.

The first few attempts were my usual result. Sharp lines everywhere and a pretty unusable image, but I was sure if I played around with the settings enough I could figure it out.

Step in R.o.I.
I haven't used this before but had seen a video of Registax5 and someone using it so I figured it was worth a shot.
So I loaded up my video again, scrubbed through till there was about 1/3 of the moon in the frame and then drew the R.o.I box around it then did my usual routine.
Low and behold, No sharp lines (well considerably less and not prominent enough to ruin the image).
So I went through all my videos this way and managed to get this.


(you can see the loss of detail at the bottom as the clouds got thicker).

I was pretty happy with the result but I thought there could be a faster way, so I looked over the settings some more and found out that in the "stack" tab, if I select "Maximized" it wouldn't crop my video. It would basically make a 'panorama'.
The down side to this is that the edges could end up with less noise as the might no get as many frames stacked, but seeing as I let the moon drift into and then out of my FoV I figured that all the detail was there as long as Registax could align it properly.

Wanting to get this just right I read up about align points a bit more and discovered that its a BAD idea to put points on the edge and how you can change the intensity selection to prevent this from happening.
I also tweaked some settings on the "stack" tab and this was the result.


As you can see, the result is pretty much the same as the first one, but its took a lot less steps to create.
(It did take Registax a lot longer to align and stack though).

All in all, a some what decent image considering the conditions but a lot was learned from the night.

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