The weather is recently very good and nights are almost cloudless. The nights now are very short (~22:30 – 4:30) but still I could get enough frames to create those nice movies of the stars. I used StarStax which has a very cool setting of stacking pictures together (as my previously developed script) but provides much more control. Besides standard stacking using lighten blending mode, it also provides many others (gap filling, darken, add, subtract, etc). Very interesting is comet mode which takes only a range of frames and processed pictures look like an incomplete star trail. In addition, there is also an option to save processed frames – those I took to create a movie with FFmpeg.
#!/bin/bash
d=$($ls -tr S* | head -1)
echo Jaki FPS?
read fps
echo $d
cat *.jpg | ffmpeg -f image2pipe -framerate $fps -vcodec mjpeg -i - -vcodec libx264 -crf 25 $(date +%Y%m%d).mp4
Movies you can check below show the difference between comet mode and standard. Besides this, it looks really awesome how the stars move in the sky (which is of course not true 😉