The Moon and a Flare

Another glorious day, followed by a reasonably clear night. I had a list of 5 Flares to try and catch last night, and I decided I'd setup the scope and have a go with the webcam on the moon again with the flares interspersed in the moon captures.

I set up the SatCatcher. The first flare, after some careful ponderations over it's location proved to be behind a tree in the neighbours garden, I wonder if they'd notice if I took a few branches off here and there ? Probably. Oh well. Mean while I got the scope and gear all setup and was working on getting focus with the webcam in black and white mode, thought it worth a try. Didn't really capture much, just working on trying to achieve focus and see how much the shifter pushes the image around. The second flare came around, my palm went off and I went over and setup the camera. At the correct moment I hit the shutter button, waited, and reviewed the image. Black. Oh no, what's wrong with the camera? No, what's wrong with the operator ? I'd taken a 30 second exposure of the inside of the lens cap, again!!

Back to the scope. I decided I'd have a go with a RAW mod on the webcam. Very easy to do, there's a nice piece of software available that handles all the changes for you. Captured a few AVIs, with a pause to dash over to the SatCather, where I did finally get the settings on the camera right, but the direction was slightly off. I don't think the compass was aligned quite correctly. Need to look into that.

Iridium 3 Mag -2



After capturing a bunch of AVI's some at F5 and one at F10 I transfered them to the desktop for processing. Having run them through aviraw, and after several attempts with Multipoint processing in Registax that didn't work as expected, I settled on single point. Here's the results after wavelets and a little PS sharpening. The 2 panel mosaic was constructed in PS as iMerge did odd things with the matrix overlay.

The Theo region


2 Panel mosaic


I hope it's clear again tonight so that I can try this with the webcam in colour mode.