Process Your Planetary Astrophotography | High Point Scientific 

Glad it was helpful!

Hello! A 3x barlow was used, the 8" dobsonian OTA was placed on a CGX mount.

It shouldn't make an impact, the moons of Jupiter are pretty small and your focus is on the planet itself. SER isn't necessarily higher quality, but it saves more disk space vs an .avi file and can go up to 16 bit.

Correct putting alingment points on the moon is key for getting a nice round moon and possibly surface details

You should be able to run these programs using Wine, but AFAIK there's no real way to do this type of processing with Mac OS.

@@kyled7969 seems the moon and sun photos I have will have to wait until I get a PC thanks for the information

Hello! We do not plan on creating a video using Apple software given the lack of support for astrophotography.

You can run this software with Wine or Parallels. I use both on all of my Macs.

@@battleop I will give a try are they free

I found the same. There are a few things to consider. First of all, you need to get your telescope pointing in the right direction = that may sound obvious, but for small, planetary tragets you need to get it right. I ended up buying a sighting device which at least gets me in the vicinity of my target. Next thing is focus. You may have focussed on the planet in an eyepiece, but if you swop to a camera (DSLR or video cap) you need to change the focus. An out of focus target, like a star or planet, will show up as a faint fuzzy 'donut' shape. That's ok, though - if you can get that onscreen, you can then fine tune the focus so that the image is reasonably sharp. Finally, if your target looks washed out, reduce the gain (on vidcal cameras) or the exposure on DSLRs. A further complication is that your target will seem to drift across your field of view. If you have a telescope that can track a target, use that facility to keep the target centred. If you don't, the Plan B option is to set things up that your target drifts acorss the screen, so that it is visible for the maximum time possible. This is where vidcap cameras really shine - the longer clip you can capture, the more frames your stacking software has to work with and your chances of a good result are higher (all other factors, such as seeing, being as good as they can be). To be honest, I'd advise practising with the moon first. It is a big, bright target, that you can easily locate in the eyepiece. Then go for something like Jupiter. Good luck in your future efforts!