From: "doobisary" <tjp314@pacbell.net>

Date: November 8, 2012 8:52:45 PM MST

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: ONAG Review

Thanks Milton! I feel like an idiot for not having noticed that feature before! ...well, and glad that I bought a Golden Key! ;oD

I'll definitely take a look and give it a try!

-Tim.

--- In Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com, Milton Aupperle <maupperl@...> wrote:

Hi Tim;

On 7-Nov-12, at 9:08 PM, doobisary wrote:

Here's a cool potential use of a combination of Astro IIDC and an

ONAG that I've thought about, but don't have the time/resources to

implement at the moment (but one of these days!):

Use the ONAG and a pair of firewire cameras to keep the scope

centered on Jupiter with one while the other takes a multi-hour

video of Jupiter, to monitor for impacts. One could set the frame

rate to 1fps, which should be short enough to catch an impact but

not so high as to make the video file unmanageable (for searching

for flashes later). Even better would be if, say, 10fps could be

acquired and combined on the fly to produce a sharper frame for that

second than a single fram might provide. But I don't know if Astro

IIDC could do that.

Actually you can guide and record at the same time with one camera via

an AppleScript now. From page 116 of the Astro IIDC Manual:

- Astro IIDC can track and guide while grabbing frame(s) or record

movies at the same time using one camera, for example tracking on

Jupiter so that you can record the motion of it's moons over several

hours. Basically once the mount and camera are tracking an object, you

can then execute Apple Scripts that record a series of movies (see

"RecordMultipleFrames" script in the .dmg Other Folder example), grab

a frame or even stack and align frames (see "Live Image Alignment

Method" page 30 for details) while it continues guiding. For best

results, use 5 or more for pixel tracking accuracy, so that it does

not need to continuously make corrections as you just want to keep

your planet reasonably centered.

Some of the people on the list are guiding on a sunspot and imaging it

using an AppleScript to automatically take movies / images over hours

of time.

I'm not sure that the "Live Stacking", is what one wants though for

detecting Impacts on Jupiter or the dark side of the moon. You would

be better off recording at 5 to 10 fps and then post processing the

resulting movies - if there was an App that could do that (there won't

be in the App Store either).

About 15 years ago, I wrote some some code to analyze DV movie footage

that I would record with DV Camcorder for Leonide meteor shower. The

code would then make a reference movie clip of what it "thought" was a

meteor, and include a 1 second before and 1 second after the event

stopped. It worked pretty well except for planes. QuickTime is

officially deprecated in Mountain Lion now and will be excluded going

forward. Apple's AV Foundation only supports MP4 (no reference

movies) - along with uncompressed or Video with more than 8 bits per

pixel depth either.

TTYL..

Milton J. Aupperle

#1106 - 428 Chaparral Ravine View SE.

Calgary Alberta T2X 0N2

1-(403)-453-1624

maupperl@...