Quote:
Originally Posted by iceman
Go for it Al, you've been a bit dry on that front lately 
There has to be a simple way to constantly adjust focus so you get a smooth transition instead of the stepped transition.
Would having ICNR off make any difference to how it looks? Less gap? |
I've been a bit dry on a lot of fronts lately, Mike... but that's another story...
. Moving house and settling in does eat a lot of time!
I think a perfectly smooth transition would require a motorised focus adjustment and a single long exposure.
Turning ICNR off would reduce the turn around time between images, and so produce smaller steps, I'm just a bit wary of reducing the time so much that you lose the pin point star image in the blob of the first unfocussed image which will still be clipped for the brighter stars.
A method of moving the focus ring by the same amount every time would be a nice refinement
.
A variation of the theme would be to do the same process but with a tracking camera. The star images would be circular discs of varying colour from centre to outer rather than the "conical" image.
I haven't decided yet about the ICNR... when it's off, random noise will be smoothed, but hot pixels will be amplified...
Al.