LRTimelapse Forum

I'll be shooting this weekend's lunar eclipse using a few different set-ups and I can't quite figure out one part of my workflow.

In my final time lapse, I'd like the moon's position to remain static in the center of the shot while the eclipse occurs. 

One of my cameras will be mounted on a telescope, essentially a 1400mm prime. The telescope will track the moon, so framing in between photos shouldn't be far off, but I anticipate having to do a little bit of alignment correction. I'll have another camera at about 400mm which I'll have to manually reframe (I anticipate 4-5 tripod resets) and align in post.

This old thread describes using the crop keyframes as a way to align the several hundred images I'll have: http://forum.lrtimelapse.com/Thread-usin...67#pid4667

Can anyone provide more detail on that alignment workflow? The moon is big and round, I feel like alignment shouldn't be that difficult, but I'd really rather not do this many images manually.

Photoshop auto-alignment didn't work at all in my test shoot. I have access to AE CS6 if this is something that warp stabilizer could fix as well.

I think the warp stabilizer can do the job if you choose "no motion" in the result and "Position Rotation Scale" in the method. If that doesn't work, you can simply use the motion tracker. With only 2 tracking points, you will be able to stabilize the moon position and rotation (I don't think you'll need to stabilize scale).

Warp stabilizer is giving me some pretty wobbly results, no matter how I set it, and even if I just load a short subset of images in the sequence. I wonder if the changing shadow is throwing off the WS calculations? Against a black sky I figured it would be a cinch, but I guess not. 

I've never done motion tracking but I can give that a try I guess.

Would still be great to know how crop keyframes could be used (like the link in my OP) when the camera gets reset several times during the shoot.

Hi Joe,

I'm curious if you (or anyone else doing eclipse time-lapse) found a good solution for the image alignment problem.  How did your sequence turn out?