Digital Rust

Lunar and Planetary

You should probably follow the advice given in my Astrophotography section for Deep sky objects to start with..I use the term advice very loosely ;-)

Get your polar alignment as accurate as you can, put the scope on your mount and check it again, a big telescope can cause your mount to move by several millimeters ( I wasted 100's of hours of crappy pictures before somebody pointed this out to me ). This time we are using a video camera so movement of the drive electronics / mechanics is not so critical.
If you don't get your polar alignment set up your target will drift across your field of view and render it useless.

The moon and planets are very different to deep sky targets. They directly reflect the light from our sun and are in some ways easier targets. The big problem here is our own atmosphere. The term "seeing" refers to how well we can see things millions of miles away through our planets atmosphere. On a good day things are fairly quiet, on a bad day it is like trying to see an object on the horizon through a desert mirage or "boiling water"

Here is an example of what you are likely to see on a good night !!

This time I attach the DMK astrocamera to the telescope eyepiece and once again try and get the best focus possible. If the atmospheric turbulence is bad, this can be very difficult................but hey, that's life.
My camera came with video control software called IC Capture. Here you can set the frame rate, aperture and so on to get your object ready for acquisition.

When your ready, start recording and aim to try and capture as many frames as possible ( for reference, I try and get at least 2 or 3 thousand ). Your video stream may look terrible but don't worry.......just ensure you have the best focus possible.

Now transfer your avi streams across to your main p.c and open a software package called Registax. This is currently free to use and I think it rocks

Open your avi and select an alignment box appropriate for the features on the first frame of your image and click on align. Wait for it to finish scanning your frames and click on frame list. It may suggest for example that frame 1044 out of 2000 is at the top of the list. write this number down and reopen the avi. Goto frame 1044 and click your alignment box in the same place as the previous step. In the quality settings select 95%, this tells the software to throw away any frames that do not fall within 95% quality of your reference frame..........and run align again. When this has finished you may have 20 frames, you may have 300 or more. Select optimize and stack, after a few minutes your image will be generated using the best 5% of your 2000 odd frames

Go to the wavelet math functions area and enhance your image as you wish. You can then export this to photoshop for further image processing.