small camera vid.

[NCC-2893]

hi all. I'm getting a ccd cam at some stage. Wont be for a while but I was wondering if it's at all possible to take video with a small p and s camera afocal with my scope and load the resulting movie into a stacking program. More of a practice thing than anything. Any thoughts? Does the movie have to be avi? tho that could be changed of course. Thanks.

[2stroke]

My wifes first shots were done afocal with a cannon powershot 495 by hand, with a dob and no tracking. This method produced some unreal images of Saturn and Jupiter using registax, most of them are better then the ones done with the celestron nextimager :) You can always convert then video to a format that registax supports if need be, so no it doesn't have to be .avi. The main thing is the codec used and using the least compression possible to give registax the best quality data to work with. A big tip to make life better is to make or buy a bracket to hold your camera steady, and dont use digi zoom only optical. Here a useful link http://www.astronomyforbeginners.com/astrophotography/afocal.php

[jjjnettie]

:) You certainly can achieve some nice photos using the Afocal method.
You'll be learning valuable processing skills along the way too.

These were taken through a 10" Dob, no tracking, using a clunky old brick of a video camera.
The video was captured, converted to .avi, then run through Registax and processed using Irfanview.

[NCC-2893]

Some good advise. I think That bracket to hold the cam is a good idea. I'm looking at those jupiter pics thinking one day. So i thought I'd try shooting the moon this morning Just so i could at least try that registax program. I downloaded the latest one. I put my camera on a tripod, set the camera up with appropriate shutter f stop etc. Gave it full x24 optical zoom and took some pics. Then a short vid. When I loaded the vid into registax I noticed the size of the moon was way small in the viewing box. The example given on the website showed the viewing box full of moon as it were. My little moon wasn't big enough to apply more than 2 or 3 alighn markers. I shot the vid in HD on same x24 zoom. Any ideas ? many thanks. Ps, the pics came out fantastic. More than happy. I cant wait to try it behind the scope.