Excellent Tutorial!!! Three years later we have the HHHR mode on the OM1 that is probably a much better way to shoot the moon and have the camera align the images internally. Then if you stack some of those, you might get similar results...or not....I will have to try...
Your channel opened up a whole new world for me - or dare I say galaxy! I was particularly impressed by how you compared noise in between the E-M1 III and the E-M1X - that tickled my engineer nerves.
Hey Ben, Just found your channel following a tip from a fellow subscriber of the OMSystem channel where I was watching a video about how to photograph the moon using EM1 Mk3 and 100-400 on a tripod for an HR image. But this video has blown me away. I will be re-watching and taking notes on the video settings etc used and will be downloading Lynkeos (If it does onto my PC!) and giving your tutorial a go. Thankyou.
Nice video, thanks. I have noticed that my new olympus 100-400 mm lens is loser on all olympus camera mounts I have compared to other olympus lenses. The lens tend to slightly move while focusing. Have you noticed similar phenomenon with your lens? thanks
Mine is very snug. However I have heard a few others say the same thing as you. I think lens snugness is a problem with many lenses but smaller ones are less noticeable. With the 100-400 being so large it is more apparent. If tis too tight it will we are the cameras bayonet.
Thanks for the recap, looking fwd. to trying it out. Btw - about halfway through the video some background music started and ended up making it difficult to follow along. Somewhat distracting in clearly hearing your instructions.
Ya so open the app through the finder. Option right click and you can open it. Its really unfortunate that Apple is locking up their computers this way. But at least there are still work arounds. Lynkeos can be trusted.
@@TheNarrowbandChannel Thanks for the confirmation. FWIW, I don't mind the extra controls at all. Helps to keeps my Mac much safer than any Windows machine.
Hi Ben! Took my first ever moon photos last night with my EM1 MK II (w/ 75-300 lens)! Stills came out ok, the video not so good. Watching your video I noticed your ISO was at 200ish. I was able to match the settings but when I hit 'record' my camera locked the ISO to AUTO. I have not been able to figure out to change it - seems to be stuck at AUTO. Causes the moon to be blown out! What am I missing?
@@TheNarrowbandChannel Thanks! I ran into a challenge in the menu though. I only have 3 menu items: Movie format, Noise Filter, and Picture Mode (On/Off). ( I believe my EM1 MK2 is at the latest firmware -3.4) However, I did manage to get it to switch ranges between 400-6400 (trying to figure out what I did to do that. Life is an adventure!
Not sure what I did or how it happened, which button I pushed o what feature I changed, but it appears that my ISO can now be set between 200 and 6400 in Video mode. I don't know if that is normal, but I can work with it! Thanks for your help Ben. Now to find a clear sky with a moon!
Great video! i GOT really EXCITED about the possibilities, so I went to download the software. I sadly discovered that it is Apple based. Is there a Windows version or windows counterpart available?
You should get a Mac! There is Siril Which I will be doing a video on soon. There is also autstakkert which is PC only but has to be payed for to use the best features.
@@TheNarrowbandChannel Checked out the SIRIL website, looking forward to your review (looks promising). The autstakkert software also looks interesting but appears to be older with updates ending in 2018. This is all new to me, not sure what I am getting into, so the adventure begins!
Hey just found your channel - awesome. Question: if I don't have a tracker, I'm guessing the video time would be a lot shorter than 5 minutes? The moon moves pretty quickly at 600mm and beyond. Would you take several, shorter videos? Can you stack more than 1 video together?
This is a really neat idea but does it really make an image that much better than the 80mp tripod High-Res shot mode? I prefer to use that for my moon shots and am perfectly satisfied with the sharpness and detail preserved. Edit: just got to the end of the video and saw the comparison to the High-Res mode. The rotation of the moon is very different there. I wonder how sharp the HR pic would look with all the same craters as the video one. Very interesting technique.
The high Rez shot is defiantly easier. Planetary photography sting software is a pain and supper slow. Where with the high Rez mod you just snap and look. I am going to give macro focus stacking a try except without shifting focus. The algorithm should in theory stack only the sharpest parts of the image.
Thanks, this really works! And on my M1 Mac, the processing was done in seconds. For good results, good values in postprocessing are crucial, but the Lynkeos wiki gives some advice. I used deconvolution, unsharp mask and Lucy Richardson with 5 iterations. Don't really understand that, but it looked good to me. The result is still not perfectly sharp, but the next step is to get a more sturdy tripod head. Update: Got good results with 7 shots hand-held highres on tripod, stacking in Affinity Photo (as a focus stack).
@@TheNarrowbandChannel But even if the basic M1 is faster than the fastest Intel Mac, I still wouldn't expect such a speed-up, there must be something else. Additionally, the Lynkeas website claims that it uses SSE--which the M1 doesn't have.
@@hauke3644 I think tomorrow I have another video on photographing the moon and processing with Lynkeos. What I am doing now is using OM Workspace to sort the images by sharpness before putting them into Lynkeos so that the Lynkeos work goes a lot faster.
Ah I see it is in fact a Mac only app. Well there is autostackert and Siril. I will probably do my next video using Siril and though Ill be doing it on the Mac it is available on the PC.
Glad to see this video on video, Ben. I know next to nothing about video formats and editing, but I was glad to see 4k mode was usable for this (other reading I've done seemed to suggest FHD (with ALL-I sampling) was the only option for stacking. Any thoughts on the pros and cons between these two modes?
I'm using a 2019 MacBook Pro laptop running Catalina (OS 10.15.7). The latest version of Lynkeos shows an update as of August 2023, yet I'm getting a warning that the program needs to be updated to run on my computer. No further updates exist, so if anyone can suggest how I might resolve this it would be much appreciated. It won't install unless updated.
Hello Ben. I tried to do this last night with the Leica 100 - 400mm lens @ 400mm but noticed the moon would slip out of the "Field of view" in approximately a minute so I am assuming I'll need some fort of tracking to be able to shoot for five minutes. Is there another strategy such as smaller video clips combined into one? Many thanks for any ideas.
thanks for the video. I now have several sets of 5-minutes video. Having shot without a tracker, the moon moves from one end to the other of the frame. Is this a problem? Can I still set the sampling red frame just around the first image, or do I have to take into account the fact that pretty soon the moon in the video will drift away? Thanks again!
OK, I figured it out. Indeed the subject must be in the red frame -- if it drifts too much you have to a) split the video into a few segments, b) center the moon about in the middle in each segment, and c) stitch the segments back together and then proceed as usual in Linkeos.
I am actually not really sure. I have not tried it with footage that steady. The software looks at each frame as though it were a still photo though. It should work.
@@TheNarrowbandChannel it's very sensitive: if the moon drifts just outside of the red frame, the alignment fails, which leads later to problems because the non-aligned frames are not automatically removed and cause spurious results. I tried two approaches -- remember I use no tracker: 1) shoot five minutes continuously, then split the video in five segments and use an editor to put the moon back in the middle in each segment, then glue the segments back into a five-minute video. This took about five extra minutes and in the end all frames were properly handled 2) shoot five videos of one minutes each, each time resetting the moon in the middle of the viewfinder, then making a single five minutes video. This of course takes no time in post-processing, but is cumbersome at shooting time, and also lead in my case to some frames failing to align because of errors in the resetting of the framing. So i will in the future only use the first method.
And I assume since you can do 25fps in video mode, you have less of the rotation of the moon in a given time period. Which also means more frames of a given shot.
one day I was out early in the morning and pointed my sigma 60-600 at the moon, the f9 1/250 iso100 shot at 900mm I took handheld casually and didnt bother to check is my best moon shot ever (not that I would attempt it more than handfull of times). dunno if it was air clarity that morning or what. When comparing with the two shots in your video , I know it is just a video, I can say its surely less detailed and less sharp than the video stack but better than the high res stack imho. Maybe its the video downgrading the quality. Just wanted to say that under good conditions (I believe that's the reason) with a decent lens, one can get a nice shot without much processing. I am happy about that shot till this day.
Its distance is well past infinity so no stacking necessary. That stacking feature is pretty cool though for macro. Will be trying it out this spring for sure.
@@TheNarrowbandChannel - no, it's distance as I have found is quite short of infinity. Most lenses will 'go past' infinity. I can focus on the rim or the terminator where the most interesting features will lie. The 'peaking' will appear to slide across the surface as the focus is turned. I've also found that Jupiter is not at infinity. Tightening up on the focus makes a fair bit of difference. If I get some good viewing I plan on having a go with the 100-400 on the G9. It's fairly simple to run a sequence of focus stacking.
@@jeffslade1892 Ok I think I understand now what you are saying. So what you are seeing with differing points of infinity are changed to your environment. Because even the smallest variance in temperature will actually cause the point of infinity to change in a lens. What happens is parts of the lens shrink or swell with changes in temperature and humidity too. Also Barometric presser affects it but to a smaller extent. These changes all add up to changing the point of infinity for a lens. Now for the moon it will just be at infinity. because of the Moon distance being over 238,000 miles (384,400km) it is well past infinity. Here is how infinity is calculated for a lens. Its focal length squared then divided by its circle of confusion which is first multiplied by its f stop number. F*F/(C*fStop) For the 100-400mm lens We take 400mm times itself is 160,000mm. Save that number. Now we take the circle of confusion which for a 43rds camera is generally 0.005mm (that is for a large print) multiplied by its f stop. Since the lens is f6.3 we get a number of 0.0315 Now let us divide 160,000 by 0.0315 we get 5,079,365mm. Thats about 5km. So anything past 5km will be infinity. Since the moon is many tens of thousand of times past that distance you can always just focus at infinity. And I use AF since it will compensate for changes in temperature and humidity as it affects the lens. Hope I did not throw too much math at you. Here are some links where you can play with the numbers yourself. Circle of confusion www.photopills.com/calculators/coc Infinity formula www.lightstalking.com/calculate-use-hyperfocal-distance-better-landscape-photography/
Realmente con mi 100 400 OM 1 EX s320 f: 8 me sale la luna quemada he variado el Shuter y el diafragma y no pude hacer nada con esta luna llena, Gracias por el vide excelente
You said that a tracking mount was not necessary, and that a tripod is really all you need. How are you going to get a five minute exposure without a tracking mount to keep the moon centered in your frame? You can't.
Yes. You can do short video sessions. A single minute will get you 1800 frames if you shoot 30fps. I used the tracker to keep it in frame for longer. I did about 5min of video but only stacked about 1min of it. The EM1 seams to split up video into 1.5min sections when you shoot in 4K.
Stupid noob question. Why isn't this method used to capture faint nebula instead of hours of long exposures. Wouldn't you get thousands more exposures to stack in a given time and therefore more data in a more efficient way
I use a 75-300mm non prime to shoot the moon hand held. Then I stack it and I get fantastic results. Thank you for this video
Great video Ben👍
Hi, I have the same lens as yours. Can you show me the result?
Excellent Tutorial!!! Three years later we have the HHHR mode on the OM1 that is probably a much better way to shoot the moon and have the camera align the images internally. Then if you stack some of those, you might get similar results...or not....I will have to try...
Your channel opened up a whole new world for me - or dare I say galaxy!
I was particularly impressed by how you compared noise in between the E-M1 III and the E-M1X - that tickled my engineer nerves.
Thank you! I want to help people get more into this with their Oly gear.
Seamed like a very underserved area.
Hey Ben,
Just found your channel following a tip from a fellow subscriber of the OMSystem channel where I was watching a video about how to photograph the moon using EM1 Mk3 and 100-400 on a tripod for an HR image. But this video has blown me away. I will be re-watching and taking notes on the video settings etc used and will be downloading Lynkeos (If it does onto my PC!) and giving your tutorial a go. Thankyou.
Thank you. It has been a fun lens that has payed for itself.
Thank you Ben, and I like the “let’s do this “ 😊, will do the moon someday soon.
You got me here. olympus user here too.
Great tutorial, exactly what I am looking for using video for stacking. Thank you very much!
"Let's do this!" 😁
Nice video, thanks. I have noticed that my new olympus 100-400 mm lens is loser on all olympus camera mounts I have compared to other olympus lenses. The lens tend to slightly move while focusing. Have you noticed similar phenomenon with your lens? thanks
Mine is very snug. However I have heard a few others say the same thing as you. I think lens snugness is a problem with many lenses but smaller ones are less noticeable. With the 100-400 being so large it is more apparent. If tis too tight it will we are the cameras bayonet.
I will try to adress this when I do the review for this lens.
Amazing. I really gotta give it a go.
Thanks for the recap, looking fwd. to trying it out. Btw - about halfway through the video some background music started and ended up making it difficult to follow along. Somewhat distracting in clearly hearing your instructions.
Ya it did a poor job of editing my audio back then. One of these days I will reshoot a video like this.
Did you have any MacOS Security warnings when installing Lynkeos? My Catalina won't open it due it being from an 'un-identified developer'.
Ya so open the app through the finder. Option right click and you can open it. Its really unfortunate that Apple is locking up their computers this way. But at least there are still work arounds. Lynkeos can be trusted.
@@TheNarrowbandChannel Thanks for the confirmation. FWIW, I don't mind the extra controls at all. Helps to keeps my Mac much safer than any Windows machine.
Thank you Ben! Great tutorial!!
My pleasure!
Hi Ben! Took my first ever moon photos last night with my EM1 MK II (w/ 75-300 lens)! Stills came out ok, the video not so good. Watching your video I noticed your ISO was at 200ish. I was able to match the settings but when I hit 'record' my camera locked the ISO to AUTO. I have not been able to figure out to change it - seems to be stuck at AUTO. Causes the moon to be blown out! What am I missing?
HI Scott. The option to control that is inside the video menu. Hit Menu
@@TheNarrowbandChannel Thanks! I ran into a challenge in the menu though. I only have 3 menu items: Movie format, Noise Filter, and Picture Mode (On/Off). ( I believe my EM1 MK2 is at the latest firmware -3.4) However, I did manage to get it to switch ranges between 400-6400 (trying to figure out what I did to do that. Life is an adventure!
Not sure what I did or how it happened, which button I pushed o what feature I changed, but it appears that my ISO can now be set between 200 and 6400 in Video mode. I don't know if that is normal, but I can work with it! Thanks for your help Ben. Now to find a clear sky with a moon!
wonderful, thanks! I saw the software supports videos of planets as well, have you tried that? Of course you would need a telescope.
Yes I have and it works well. Do not try to throw 4K at it though. Even the fastest computer will choke on that.
Great video! i GOT really EXCITED about the possibilities, so I went to download the software. I sadly discovered that it is Apple based. Is there a Windows version or windows counterpart available?
You should get a Mac! There is Siril Which I will be doing a video on soon. There is also autstakkert which is PC only but has to be payed for to use the best features.
@@TheNarrowbandChannel Checked out the SIRIL website, looking forward to your review (looks promising). The autstakkert software also looks interesting but appears to be older with updates ending in 2018. This is all new to me, not sure what I am getting into, so the adventure begins!
Hey just found your channel - awesome. Question: if I don't have a tracker, I'm guessing the video time would be a lot shorter than 5 minutes? The moon moves pretty quickly at 600mm and beyond. Would you take several, shorter videos? Can you stack more than 1 video together?
Yes shorter videos will work. A lot of people do it this way.
This is a really neat idea but does it really make an image that much better than the 80mp tripod High-Res shot mode?
I prefer to use that for my moon shots and am perfectly satisfied with the sharpness and detail preserved.
Edit: just got to the end of the video and saw the comparison to the High-Res mode. The rotation of the moon is very different there. I wonder how sharp the HR pic would look with all the same craters as the video one. Very interesting technique.
The high Rez shot is defiantly easier. Planetary photography sting software is a pain and supper slow. Where with the high Rez mod you just snap and look. I am going to give macro focus stacking a try except without shifting focus. The algorithm should in theory stack only the sharpest parts of the image.
Thanks, this really works! And on my M1 Mac, the processing was done in seconds. For good results, good values in postprocessing are crucial, but the Lynkeos wiki gives some advice. I used deconvolution, unsharp mask and Lucy Richardson with 5 iterations. Don't really understand that, but it looked good to me. The result is still not perfectly sharp, but the next step is to get a more sturdy tripod head.
Update: Got good results with 7 shots hand-held highres on tripod, stacking in Affinity Photo (as a focus stack).
How many images were you stacking or was it video? Takes my intel Mac hours to process.
@@TheNarrowbandChannel 40 frames from C4K video
@@hauke3644 I will have to get a M1 Mac then. Have the last and fastest generation of MacBook Pro that was not M1.
@@TheNarrowbandChannel But even if the basic M1 is faster than the fastest Intel Mac, I still wouldn't expect such a speed-up, there must be something else. Additionally, the Lynkeas website claims that it uses SSE--which the M1 doesn't have.
@@hauke3644 I think tomorrow I have another video on photographing the moon and processing with Lynkeos. What I am doing now is using OM Workspace to sort the images by sharpness before putting them into Lynkeos so that the Lynkeos work goes a lot faster.
Does anyone know any video stacking software for Windows similar to Lynkeos?
Ah I see it is in fact a Mac only app. Well there is autostackert and Siril. I will probably do my next video using Siril and though Ill be doing it on the Mac it is available on the PC.
@@TheNarrowbandChannel Thank you very much. I enjoy watching your videos. Very well presented.
@@TheNarrowbandChannel looking forward to a windows equivalent tutorial, thanks
Glad to see this video on video, Ben. I know next to nothing about video formats and editing, but I was glad to see 4k mode was usable for this (other reading I've done seemed to suggest FHD (with ALL-I sampling) was the only option for stacking. Any thoughts on the pros and cons between these two modes?
FHD is something I need an external recorder to do but it sounds like it would give a huge boost to resolution!
Is there PC software to do the same as Lynkeos.. Tks
Yes there is. Autostackert i think is the best one
I'm using a 2019 MacBook Pro laptop running Catalina (OS 10.15.7). The latest version of Lynkeos shows an update as of August 2023, yet I'm getting a warning that the program needs to be updated to run on my computer. No further updates exist, so if anyone can suggest how I might resolve this it would be much appreciated. It won't install unless updated.
There have been two recent updates that have made it a lot faster. These apps though are very ram heavy. They require a lot. Even my 128gb gets full.
Hello Ben. I tried to do this last night with the Leica 100 - 400mm lens @ 400mm but noticed the moon would slip out of the "Field of view" in approximately a minute so I am assuming I'll need some fort of tracking to be able to shoot for five minutes. Is there another strategy such as smaller video clips combined into one? Many thanks for any ideas.
Yes actually video is a very popular way to do it. Trouble is getting the software to cooperate.
Good tutorial. You caught the Lunar X and V.
I had forgotten about them. Should have pointed it out in the video. Thanks and good catch.
WIll Try with 300mm F4 when i get it, which will give ~600mm, and 840 with 1.4 tc see how the results come out
thanks for the video. I now have several sets of 5-minutes video. Having shot without a tracker, the moon moves from one end to the other of the frame. Is this a problem? Can I still set the sampling red frame just around the first image, or do I have to take into account the fact that pretty soon the moon in the video will drift away? Thanks again!
OK, I figured it out. Indeed the subject must be in the red frame -- if it drifts too much you have to a) split the video into a few segments, b) center the moon about in the middle in each segment, and c) stitch the segments back together and then proceed as usual in Linkeos.
I am actually not really sure. I have not tried it with footage that steady. The software looks at each frame as though it were a still photo though. It should work.
@@TheNarrowbandChannel it's very sensitive: if the moon drifts just outside of the red frame, the alignment fails, which leads later to problems because the non-aligned frames are not automatically removed and cause spurious results. I tried two approaches -- remember I use no tracker:
1) shoot five minutes continuously, then split the video in five segments and use an editor to put the moon back in the middle in each segment, then glue the segments back into a five-minute video. This took about five extra minutes and in the end all frames were properly handled
2) shoot five videos of one minutes each, each time resetting the moon in the middle of the viewfinder, then making a single five minutes video. This of course takes no time in post-processing, but is cumbersome at shooting time, and also lead in my case to some frames failing to align because of errors in the resetting of the framing.
So i will in the future only use the first method.
What lens do you use???
In this video I was using the 100-400 Olympus lens with the 1.4x teleconverter.
Ben - can you explain why the video method yields a sharper image? Is it due to the number of frames you processed?
Yes its because the of the number of frames. We are stacking thousands instead of a hundred.
And I assume since you can do 25fps in video mode, you have less of the rotation of the moon in a given time period. Which also means more frames of a given shot.
@@SirMo You can do 60fps too but I will do a video on that later. it yields very nice results though the files are quite large.
one day I was out early in the morning and pointed my sigma 60-600 at the moon, the f9 1/250 iso100 shot at 900mm I took handheld casually and didnt bother to check is my best moon shot ever (not that I would attempt it more than handfull of times). dunno if it was air clarity that morning or what. When comparing with the two shots in your video , I know it is just a video, I can say its surely less detailed and less sharp than the video stack but better than the high res stack imho. Maybe its the video downgrading the quality. Just wanted to say that under good conditions (I believe that's the reason) with a decent lens, one can get a nice shot without much processing. I am happy about that shot till this day.
Yes good seeing is very important. Mornings are actually a very good time because the air has calmed down by then.
Given the diameter of the moon you need a depth of field of about 1700km and a telephoto lens has a shallow DoF. Have you tried focus stacking?
Its distance is well past infinity so no stacking necessary.
That stacking feature is pretty cool though for macro. Will be trying it out this spring for sure.
@@TheNarrowbandChannel - no, it's distance as I have found is quite short of infinity. Most lenses will 'go past' infinity. I can focus on the rim or the terminator where the most interesting features will lie. The 'peaking' will appear to slide across the surface as the focus is turned. I've also found that Jupiter is not at infinity. Tightening up on the focus makes a fair bit of difference.
If I get some good viewing I plan on having a go with the 100-400 on the G9. It's fairly simple to run a sequence of focus stacking.
@@jeffslade1892 Ok I think I understand now what you are saying. So what you are seeing with differing points of infinity are changed to your environment. Because even the smallest variance in temperature will actually cause the point of infinity to change in a lens.
What happens is parts of the lens shrink or swell with changes in temperature and humidity too. Also Barometric presser affects it but to a smaller extent. These changes all add up to changing the point of infinity for a lens.
Now for the moon it will just be at infinity. because of the Moon distance being over 238,000 miles (384,400km) it is well past infinity. Here is how infinity is calculated for a lens.
Its focal length squared then divided by its circle of confusion which is first multiplied by its f stop number.
F*F/(C*fStop)
For the 100-400mm lens We take 400mm times itself is 160,000mm. Save that number.
Now we take the circle of confusion which for a 43rds camera is generally 0.005mm (that is for a large print) multiplied by its f stop. Since the lens is f6.3 we get a number of 0.0315
Now let us divide 160,000 by 0.0315 we get 5,079,365mm. Thats about 5km. So anything past 5km will be infinity. Since the moon is many tens of thousand of times past that distance you can always just focus at infinity.
And I use AF since it will compensate for changes in temperature and humidity as it affects the lens.
Hope I did not throw too much math at you.
Here are some links where you can play with the numbers yourself.
Circle of confusion www.photopills.com/calculators/coc
Infinity formula www.lightstalking.com/calculate-use-hyperfocal-distance-better-landscape-photography/
Realmente con mi 100 400 OM 1 EX s320 f: 8 me sale la luna quemada he variado el Shuter y el diafragma y no pude hacer nada con esta luna llena, Gracias por el vide excelente
Great video Ben👍
Thank you Annette!
You said that a tracking mount was not necessary, and that a tripod is really all you need. How are you going to get a five minute exposure without a tracking mount to keep the moon centered in your frame?
You can't.
Yes. You can do short video sessions. A single minute will get you 1800 frames if you shoot 30fps. I used the tracker to keep it in frame for longer. I did about 5min of video but only stacked about 1min of it. The EM1 seams to split up video into 1.5min sections when you shoot in 4K.
Mac OS X only :(
Macs are great. you should switch over to the dark side ;)
@@TheNarrowbandChannel In art school, I used both, they be just tools eh?
@@ridealongwithrandy Yes I agree.
Stupid noob question. Why isn't this method used to capture faint nebula instead of hours of long exposures. Wouldn't you get thousands more exposures to stack in a given time and therefore more data in a more efficient way
Read noise would obscure the image Until sensors have read noise bellow 0.1e we won't see that change. Currently the OM has a read noise of 1.24e
@@TheNarrowbandChannel thanks for the clarification I knew I was missing something!
I know this is a late comment, but I am going to try this on the moon tonight, except use Registax 6
Have you found a convenient way to stack video footage? Most of the software I have all want an AVI file.
@@TheNarrowbandChannel not yet ...
Do Jupiter
Would love to though it is starting to get distant. I am going to do one more on the moon soon but have a few other videos in the works first.
I thought video said photos...
You turn the video into a photo in the tutorial. That work is all done in the processing part.