From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: November 13, 2009 4:00:28 PM MST

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] New in every way

On 13-Nov-09, at 3:30 PM, yvesvandenbroek wrote:

Hi,

this summer I picked up interest in astronomy, and bought my first scope a 80 mm refractor.

I have an altz az. and eq mount without goto but on drive.

I also had an interest in asltrophotograpy, but because of all the HW requirements and guiding I have pushed this to the "in the years to come" category.

In the mean time I have seen good results  with astrovideo cam's like the watec and mintron, and I long hesitated to buy one of these, but after finding this software on Mac, I decided to buy a first gen Flea FW camera ... which will be arriving in 2 weeks ...

So I started to read the manual and was interested in the live image alignment method,

It will only work with reasonably bright star like objects. It won't work well with a multitude of stars or poor tracking as it uses a simple centroid mechanism for alignment.

and was wondering that besides the live view of the camera you can see the updated image of the stacking - alignment in another window ... kind of like deep sky stacker live or astrovideo can do ....

Not live, but you can optionally view the stacked aligned or summed result you captured which is passed to your default previewing image application.

Read :

1) pages 23 and 24 for the details of using "The "Live Image Alignment Method" sub menu" items.

2) page 71 for details on specifying the number of frames to average or sum (i.e " When Averaging Frames, use xxxx frame(s)." and ""When Summing Frames, use xxxx frame(s).")

3) page 70 on the  check box "After Saving a Frame, open it with the default application." which will auto display the last captured frame.

4) pages 77 and 78 for Live Alignment with using the "Grab Avg. Frame" and "Grab Sum. Frame" buttons

A nice feature that would be woaw to me and at star party's would be a full screen image of the 2 screens (one live and one enhanced stacked). If you decide to change object you can push a short cut so the stacking starts all over again on the new subject.

More or less done. Click on Grab Average or Grab Sum and you have your next series of stacked frames ready to go and presented to you.

HTH..

Milton Aupperle