Lulin animation at 250mm

[deadsimple]

Hey all,

Here's a 108 min time-lapse of Lulin from Feb 27th. Done on a 450D with 55-250mm kit lens (@250mm, f/5.6) mounted directly on a dumb (tracking-only) EQ6. Each frame was 25 secs in duration at ISO 800 with in-camera noise reduction. I want to buy a carton of beer for the author of the Canon EOS utility - saved me so much time in automation!

Instead of cropping each frame by hand, I wrote some MATLAB code to register and automatically crop the area of interest, so that was quite a learning experience in terms of image processing and as much fun as actually capturing the photons!

Enjoy!

http://www.smugmug.com/gallery/7398565_XCrCt/1/#482775196_nwwsz-A-LB

[AlexN]

Thats really awesome... definitely shows the speed of this baby! :)

Well done indeed!

[h0ughy]

excellent annimation, i really enjoyed that

[astroron]

Thankyou for posting:)it is so quick,even naked eye it can be seen to have changed position over a couple of hours:thumbsup:

[iceman]

Very cool!

[Dennis]

Very nice animation Ash - top stuff!

As I can’t write MATLAB, I use the “Actions” function in CS3 to record what are effectively macros and this save heaps of time, although its perhaps not as much fun as cutting your own custom code!

Cheers

Dennis

[deadsimple]

I used CS4's macro/batch tool to pre-crop and adjust levels automatically, but I still needed to align 100+ images (mount drift + hand paddle adjustments made over 2 hours) and I wasn't sure what photoshop could do in terms of automatic registration.

Plus registration gets complicated when there's a moving object (e.g. comet), so I just wrote some code/template-images that took that into account and ignored the comet. Still some wobble left over but meh ...

[Lester]

I like it, thanks.