Thanks for the interest Ganesh / Shankar. I have used my regular 40D camera here for this video, and is a result of combining 384 individual images shot a 3 sec interval over a span of 30 mins approximately. I have used no pro level video cams
I have listed the process and equipment list below.
Equipment listEOS 40D
Sigma 10-20 (@10 mm)
10 stop Singhray Variable ND filter (dialed at 4 stops)
Canon TC80N3 Timer Remote (Thanks to VMR for both this and the ND filter)
An electronic Telescope mount modified to take the 40D for the panning (
http://www.celestron.com/c3/product.php ... &ProdID=29 )
I have also uploaded a couple of pictures of the setup equipment just in case at the link below
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/sredir?u ... feat=emailProcessI dialed in a 3 sec time interval in the timer remote to fire a frame at every 3 seconds. I then achieved an exposure of 1/40sec at f8 with the ND filter dialed in to reduce 4 stops of light, (any higher reduction of light on the ND was leading to serious vignetting at 10 mm, so had to settle at 4 stops). My image quality was set at JPEG L. I then programmed my telescope head to pan at 3X (earth rotates at 8X) in the horizontal direction from the Right to Left. And I let the setup fire for 30mins approx.
Video generationAfter downloading the JPEGs I did a batch processing of the entire lot using Light Room. The editing included Cropping in the 16:9 format for HD conversion and basic light/color/saturation fixes. Then I used Quicktime Pro to combine all these individual frames into a movie file at 30 frames per second, to get the final output.
Hope this was informative. Please let me know if you need additional details, and I will be happy to share.