From: Alan Friedman <alan@greatarrow.com>

Date: November 3, 2009 9:56:23 AM MST

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] First light Scorpion and the Full Moon


Great to see all these Scorpion stings!


Howard - You've done a nice job keep some bright tonality in Aristarchus. Overall, the image seems noisy to me considering a stack of 900 frames. I would think a lunar capture at this focal ratio should be possible with low gain and would expect the individual frames to have very low noise prior to stacking.


Thanks for posting... look forward to seeing more of your shots from the big apple.


Alan




On Nov 3, 2009, at 11:45 AM, Howard wrote:

Full Moon last night and clear skies. I set up on my roof, and took sixeen exposures in an hour: 20Gb monochrome. I am very happy using Astro IIDC for capture. ETX 125, scorpion 1.4Mp camera, focal reducer to f7.5. Conditions are a bit too extreme in Manhattan to stack the .mov, or I haven't picked the right settings, so I export the .mov files to .avi no compression. These are saved to an external drive and I reboot the mac to Windows 7 and run registax 5 to stack. Saving as tif, it's back to the mac for Photoshop. I was most interested in getting the rays well defined without blowing out Aristarchus. You can find the image in the photo album finkh.
Only the original shows the details.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Astro_IIDC/photos/album/275060372/pic/894731450/view?picmode=original&mode=tn&order=ordinal&start=1&dir=asc

1200 frames captured, 900 stacked.