Star Test Video during Bad Seeing: The Moon was at 70% phase and I was hoping to image a star test of the 127mm Astro-Tech triplet refractor. The seeing was very bad with daytime temperatures in the 70's Fahrenheit dropping into the 30's at night. This is a video of the star Regulus captured through the 127mm triplet at prime using a Modified Logitech Fusion webcam. It shows the unsteady seeing and starts with the star inside of focus and then refocused by hand to outside of focus (large 1.5M file may take awhile to load):
I captured AVI files of Regulus both inside and outside of focus, as well as in-focus, with the Fusion webcam for one minute. Registax was then used to align and stack the blurry star test frames. I know that it is not recommeded to star test in poor seeing, but here is the result without any processing:
I plan to image the star test when seeing is much better.
Moon at Prime:
One exposure with modified Canon 450D at 1/250 second and ISO 200. Image was focused using the "live-view" feature of the Canon 450D. The image is full resolution and the only processing was a crop, color balance and shadows/highlights adjustment using Photoshop CS and a very slight noise reduction with NEAT Image. No sharpening was done:
Moon using Televue 2X Big Barlow:
One exposure with modified Canon 450D at 1/50 second and ISO 200. Image was focused using the "live-view" feature of the Canon 450D and reduced in size for display. Image adjustments were color balance, shadows/highlights, slight noise reduction in NEAT Image and sharpening using Richardson-Lucy algorithm: