Making an asteroid occultation video

[Gamewarden]

I am using a 9.25 celestron Evolution scope.
I am trying to use Sharpcap to record an asteroid occultation on December 22/25 in SER format.
I have used the capture function with my camera set at exposure 200ms and the gain cranked to max. Once I get the ser video I use PIPP to convert to AVI.

Question

The video is very dark is there anyway to lighten up the video, like stretching it????

Can you use the livestack feature and record fits frames, stretch and then convert to video. I dont think this will work bc the making the the frame takes too long. the asteroid in this case will only cross the star for a total of 1.5 seconds so frame rate has to be quick.

Thanks Mark

[admin]

Hi Mark,

to be honest, I'd probably stick with your current approach, but just brighten things up in PIPP. There are options (on the Processing Options tab in PIPP) to apply a gain adjustment and/or a gamma adjustment to the images as they are processed. Setting a gain of 5.0 will make the output 5x brighter, etc.

This approach keeps you recording the raw data from the camera and lets you tinker with the brightness afterwards to get it just right.

By the way, for this sort of thing, it's probably worth working in a high bit depth mode (RAW12/16 or MONO12/16) rather than an 8 bit mode.

cheers,

Robin