Editing Your Astro-Photo

Here is step by step, how these photos are made, for those who discover the passion for astronomy. First you need a telescope and a video camera (or photo camera) and connect them to the telescope. Attaching a camera to the telescope is done in different ways: either buy a ring with a thread of your camera perfect for your telescope, or by winding with a scotch trough of the camera and eyepiece, but this method works only for cams not too heavy and built without hard memory disk. Once you've filmed, which is to be preferred in HD for maximum clarity, you will process the video (if you want of course). On your computer you must install Sony Vegas 10 or Registax. The two of them are very useful for processing, and you can work with one of them if you wish. It depends on the skills you have to learn to use them.

SONY VEGAS 10. This program generally helps you do these things with your video file:

-work-on Levels ( image levels). You should not use Levels in exaggerated way, but just to remove the white background of the darkness that will be black. If you exaggerate, you will darken the white areas which would damage the information of the image. You can use higher levels when your Moon is very bright, and in this case will highlight the true colors of the Moon.

-Sharp (clear definition) and the picture will become clearer, depends how you want it, but not overly, because craters can have edges too bright and the image could be damaged, and so the information would suffer.

These options can be used always. In Vegas are others, but it depends on how you you want to look your video ...

REGISTAX. This free little program is exclusively for astronomy and is very easy to process and use. It will align your area that you chose as a benchmark throughout your frames. Registax will eliminate turbulence in the picture because of the atmosphere, and in the end is giving you the image correctly. In any case (video or picture files), Registax will analyze all successive pictures or video, frame by frame. Sorry for my bad english...

Posted in: My way of editing Moon photos