Tracking Needed???

[67champ]

If I am going to shoot video with a planetary astro camera from my 127mm mak-cass prime focus setup; and then post process to get best possible single stacked image of the lunar surface, does my mount need to be able to track the Moon? Can I get great results if I dont have tracking? Thanks!


Dana T.

[Jon (Jonathan)]

I'm not 100% sure I know what you mean by "tracking". If you mean an autoguiding setup, then no, it's absolutely unnecessary.

If you mean a sidereal drive that simply follows the sky as the earth rotates, then again, no; you can do it manually, but it's a hell of a lot less fiddly if you do have some sort of motorised mount.

[67champ]

Yes, autoguiding..... Thanks!
dana t

[2stroke (Jay)]

What mount have you got? If its an eq just make sure its polar aligned and it will be fine unless your using a long focal length and doing a mosaic. If its an AZ i not sure as i lack experience and have only used a az dob which tracks just fine for planetary anyhow. If you have no motors to track (that means tracks not guide) then you can manually do it by hand which i use to do on an older dob, is a pain but can be done.

[traveller (Bo)]

I have done webcam planetary work with unguided EQ mount and also with fork mounts. Provided you can do a good polar align, you can get away without auto guiding. Programs such as Registax can "track" objects in processing.
Bo

[2stroke (Jay)]

Originally Posted by traveller

I have done webcam planetary work with unguided EQ mount and also with fork mounts. Provided you can do a good polar align, you can get away without auto guiding. Programs such as Registax can "track" objects in processing.
Bo

lol i use to do it with a 10" dob and a 2.5X barlow and a 900nc, well myself and wife. Doing Saturn and Jupiter was alot of work, it would shot through the feild of veiw in 6 seconds, we would then line it up again and again and record. After that it was into registax and we got some dam nice images for the seeing conditions and limitations of the 900nc. Tracking really make life simple for webcam planetary work and well now thinking of it you can't guide unless you guide of the planet because they move at different rates. To tied here lol 36hrs no sleep haha

[67champ]

I have a EQ mount (Celestron CG-5). Guess I need to google "tracking" and "autoguiding".... To date I have never polar aligned the mount. I am second owner; it may have already been done. (or does this need done everytime you use?)

In the past I have always just used the manual alignment knobs to "center" the Moon in my FOV and take a few single images, then realign/adjust FOV again take a few pics, repeat.

I downloaded Registax 6 the other night and have been watching tutorials as time has alowed. Can't wait to try it out. I should be able to find enough old images to start "testing" Registax...

Another hill to climb is to decide to purchase planetary video camera or use my Canon Rebel T4i (650d, i think the rest of the world calls it). If I use my Canon, I have choice to take multiple single shots and stack, or take video from camera. However, my video files are .MOV. So, then I would have to learn how to convert .MOV to .AVI for use by Registax, I think...

Oh, one more thing..... If I shoot RAW Mode single images, what do I need to do to them before I process in Registax?

Thanks!

Dana t

[67champ]

Well, first go at it with registax on about 6 or 8 single .JPG photos. Heres what I got after "aligning" and stacking.....



dana t

[67champ]

Limited time today to test, but I was successful in using PIPP to crop and center images prior to selecting images for registax. Looks like this alone may be the fix for this mis-aligned alignment... To be continued... :-)

dana t