Seeing a mosaic of the Moon on Saturday at Reading AS made me think if modern software could do a better job of some of my old data then I could at the time.

I still had the original avis from 2003 of a mosaic I did. The movies were captured using a ToUcam Pro with a 200mm telescope on a Dobsonian mount. I basically had 5 movies that covered the Moon in stripes.

I used VirtualDub to split the avis into files of 100 frames each and ran these through Registax v4 to get 21 images that covered the Moon, just using auto settings, I didn't carefully select frames. Then I used Autostitch to stitch them together (iMerge can't cope with the rotation of the images due to the altaz mount).

I've used Autostitch before for panoramas, there is a unlimited demo that'll work with jpegs. As long as you are careful with the order and selection of the images it'll cope with anything you chuck at it. Highly recommended piece of software.

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html

I'm sure I could get a better result with more careful selection of frames. I've just done an unsharp mask on the image. No other tweaks at all.

Time to get the camera out and get some new data!