Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

A couple of posts back, I linked to a movie my friend Tim and I took with our iSight camera through an 8.8mm eyepiece attached to our Meade LX200 12-inch scope. The movie was ok, but it was a little shaky because we held the camera by hand instead of with an adapter (which has now been constructed, details coming soon).

In the world of astrophotography, the key to creating good images is via a method called stacking, where a series of pictures of the same object are combined to enhance detail and improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the image. Usually this is a repetitive (maybe tedious) process using Photoshop or a similar application.

Yesterday I found a great piece of shareware called Keith’s Image Stacker that will take the frames from the Quicktime movie made with my iSight and stack them, mostly automatically, to create a single, sharper, still image from the movie. After a brief time learning how to use the software, I stacked the images from the movie and applied an unsharp mask to get the following image:

It’s not great, but I think it’s pretty damn good for a first attempt with the camera held by hand. When we put the adapter in place to hold the camera still, we’ll get pictures that are even sharper, and Keith and his image stacker will have my $10.