| Joined: | Mon Apr 2nd, 2012 |
| Location: | South Lakeland, UK |
| Posts: | 4066 |
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To be honest I was surprised how much movement there was in the stars on my image considering it was only 4secs for the eclipsed moon...as well as the moon itself. In contrast the normal moon shot at 1/125th is much sharper but the stars on that image didn't show at all.
I might be inclined to have a play at this myself ...when we get clear skies again!
If you put the camera on continuous, set a fast shutter speed and high ISO and just rattled off 5or6shots, you could stack them to reduce noise and then boost the highlights ( or do that before median stacking maybe) ?
The 15 sec exposures produce a lot of stubby white sausages!
I think you may be onto something with the fast 'mini stacks', at say 60 or 125th, then combining them. The intervalometer can cope with that I think. Setting the shutter to continuous slow (or fast?), the burst of four or five rapid exposures repeated every every 20 seconds.
Apart from the actual capture, the other issue I have been having has been the refusal of Photoshop to 'Auto-Align' the stacked images (in layers). Some will, others won't. I had this issue with the panoramas, I allowed almost 50% overlap on most of my pano exposures but frequently Lightroom refused to assemble then saying there wasn't sufficient overlap. Photoshop did no better with the same images. I believe the same panorama creating engine is used in both Lr and Ps.
As I use Lr for most all of my images I have taken to testing each batch of images I intend to stack by trying to get Lr to create a panorama, if it makes a successful attempt then I cancel and import those images into Ps as layers, each time I have tried it in Lr first it then works in Ps.
I have seen it written that converting the NEF to a Photoshop document (.psd), results in a greater success rate...
The other idea I had was to use the PTGui layers alignment software which is used to align images for panoramas, after all these images are in a way identical to panoramas except that they are overlapping about 99.9%, but I'm not sure how to get the aligned images into Ps as layers without allowing PTGui to actually create a panorama...
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Robert.