Hi,
Torsten Edelmann, the author of FireCapture, pointed me to this discussion.
Since I'm new to this forum, please let me shortly introduce myself. I'm a German amateur astronomer. Since about eight years ago I concentrate on lunar photography. Taking images of small surface details always seemed rather unsatisfactory to me. In the beginning, I took moon panoramas using an apo refractor and a full frame DSLR. You can find a galery of my panoramas at http://lunar.baasite...nks/MoonPhases/. Meanwhile I'm using a Celestron 11 and USB cameras, such as the ASI120MM-S.
It seems you are discussing the same problem I had about a year ago. When I was looking for a mosaic software for the moon I thought that such an obvious problem must have been solved. Except for the rudimentary solution EQMosaic, however, I didn't find any. So I embarked on a very intensive software project which I recently finished. I named my software "MoonPanoramaMaker". It covers the current moon phase with an optimized tile pattern, and in a fully automatic workflow takes videos of each tile. It is connected to FireCapture through FCs "preprocessing" interface. Therefore, the user sets all camera parameters in FC, and then the MoonPanoramaMaker triggers FC to record the videos. The software is based on ASCOM, so it should be portable.
What sounds quite easy in principle turned out to be rather challenging. The motion of the moon among the stars, the effects of libration and parallax, the misalignment of the telescope mount and many more aspects had to be taken into account at very high precision. After all, the moon spans a very small patch of sky, so I had to hit each tile center with a precision of better than 10 arcseconds.
I would love to share with you the MoonPanoramaMaker's user manual (PDF, 29 pages, written in English), but with its size of 1,4 MB it exceeds the 500KB file upload limit of this forum. Too bad! Any idea how I could upload a larger file to this forum?
All the best,
Rolf