Last month we looked at how you could physically connect your mobile phone to your telescope so that you could take pictures of the moon (and other night sky objects). If you decided to have a play then you will have taken a number of videos of the things you saw and you should, quite rightly, be very pleased with them.
One of the things that you may have noticed when playing back the video is that there might be a slight “wobble” effect, sort of a “shimmering” when you watch the footage. What you’re actually expieriencing here is the atmosphere and this month we hope to enhance your video down to a single image and remove that anomoly.
When you took your video footage you would have ended up with either a .mpeg or .avi file. Either of these is fine to work with, so just check that is what you have on your computer. There are a number of ways to move the file from your phone to your computer. DropBox is one of them (you simply install it on your phone and on your computer and then tell it to automatically upload video to DropBox from your phone, once done the video will then automatically be downloaded to your computer). If you’d like to get a copy of DropBox (its free!), then you can get it from this link – https://db.tt/ac1zH3lK
Once you have the video file that you want to work with then head over to www.astronomie.be/registax/download.html and
download and install their free software. This is what you will use to convert your video into a better quality photo. If you’re an iPhone user then you will need to download http://keithwiley.com/software/keithsImageStacker.shtml as their video format is a little different. Both pieces of software have extensive help files so that you can get to the detail but their use is pretty straight forward.