I was stuffing around last night with the new CLS 1.25" filter on the Atik 314L+ while the moon was up.
I tried stacking these 45 x 60 sec shots with DSS using comet and stars mode, but because of the total time, the stars slide all up the page and the colour washes out, as per the attached JPEG.
So, I decided to animate this instead, showing how fast it moves across the sky. After about the 6th image, I realised I could set the guidecam to 4sec images and guide off the comet itself. Stellarium showed it as relative magnitude of 10.5, so it was impressive to be able to guide off the comet using the webcam.
Yes, its screaming along in the close up FOV I get with my camera. I tried to guide on the stars but it blurred the comet as I am so close, so I thought an animation would be the best way to represent it over the 45 mins I captured it. The first few shots show some severe moon glow and some transient clouds, but these clear up later in the sequence, showing the nice coma of the comets green glow.
Yes, 4 sec exposures seemed to help on the guide camera, however, PHD and the HEQ5 kept having conniptions, hence some crappy frames mixed in there.
All in all though, it seemed to come out OK. I just didnt enjoy having to debayer, flip, rotate and process 45 separate images before resizing them and creating an animation from them. It was slightly painful.....although now, I know how to create batch macros in Photoshop CS3, its much quicker than before.
Very cool Chris! Love the animation oh how I miss my mount..
Cheers Carlos, the animation seems to be the only way to see it nicely, the stacking washes it all out, possibly because there is too many subs, I dunno. What happened to your mount?
Nice Chris.
I found the same thing, I think animation works better.
My one from last night is mostly animated clouds though, they only racked off when the sun started coming up.
Nice Chris.
I found the same thing, I think animation works better.
My one from last night is mostly animated clouds though, they only racked off when the sun started coming up.
Lol, bugger, those clouds decided to play nicely after a while, so I was happy.
