merge eclipse images without warping/ rescaling and/or rescale tosame size?

Took a series of lunar eclipse images, but since my FOV was too large
for a single capture, I imaged the top and bottom moon halves with my
DSLR with the hope of merging them later. Problem is that the merging
program is rescaling/ warping the images in order to merge so that my
goal of creating an animation is not met. I am using Autopano Giga. Is
there a way to merge without warping and keeping all images and moon the
same size with this program? If not, is there a program that will do
it? I'm looking at merging 400 images so I end up with 200 merged lunar
images. thanks

On Mon, 5 Oct 2015 11:22:27 -0400, Sam Seagate
wrote:

Took a series of lunar eclipse images, but since my FOV was too large
for a single capture, I imaged the top and bottom moon halves with my
DSLR with the hope of merging them later. Problem is that the merging
program is rescaling/ warping the images in order to merge so that my
goal of creating an animation is not met. I am using Autopano Giga. Is
there a way to merge without warping and keeping all images and moon the
same size with this program? If not, is there a program that will do
it? I'm looking at merging 400 images so I end up with 200 merged lunar
images. thanks

I assume you mean that your FOV was too _small_? So you took 200 image
pairs, capturing the top and bottom of the Moon?

Assuming your framing is nearly constant, I'd also expect the warping
to be constant. But I'm not familiar with the program you're using.
Most programs designed for stitching images together have settings
that let you control the algorithm used, or the stitching parameters.
Otherwise, have you tried simply stacking the pairs in something like
Photoshop, without any warpage at all? Depending on your lens, that
might work pretty well.

I've been using Microsoft ICE lately for terrestrial panoramas. It
works extremely well and has lots of control over the settings. Not
sure how it would do with image pairs of the Moon, but it's a free
program so you might want to give it a try.

On 10/05/2015 11:45 AM, Chris L Peterson wrote:
On Mon, 5 Oct 2015 11:22:27 -0400, Sam Seagate
wrote:

Took a series of lunar eclipse images, but since my FOV was too large
for a single capture, I imaged the top and bottom moon halves with my
DSLR with the hope of merging them later. Problem is that the merging
program is rescaling/ warping the images in order to merge so that my
goal of creating an animation is not met. I am using Autopano Giga. Is
there a way to merge without warping and keeping all images and moon the
same size with this program? If not, is there a program that will do
it? I'm looking at merging 400 images so I end up with 200 merged lunar
images. thanks

I assume you mean that your FOV was too _small_? So you took 200 image
pairs, capturing the top and bottom of the Moon?

Assuming your framing is nearly constant, I'd also expect the warping
to be constant. But I'm not familiar with the program you're using.
Most programs designed for stitching images together have settings
that let you control the algorithm used, or the stitching parameters.
Otherwise, have you tried simply stacking the pairs in something like
Photoshop, without any warpage at all? Depending on your lens, that
might work pretty well.

I've been using Microsoft ICE lately for terrestrial panoramas. It
works extremely well and has lots of control over the settings. Not
sure how it would do with image pairs of the Moon, but it's a free
program so you might want to give it a try.

Thanks, Chris, and I stand corrected as the FOV was too small! Yes, 200
top and bottom moon parts. I had to do this manually, so no tracking or
positioning other than by hand so moon segments captured vary frame by
frame.

After using Autopano, I did load the merged images into Photoshop CC as
a stack with attempted alignment. To my surprise, Photoshop did
actually attempt to make all the images the same size but I still had a
lot of difficulties. I even made up an action to select an area to make
a selection mask over transparency for each image, but there were still
quite a few lunar images that weren't resized/ positioned correctly. So
my new goal was to try and do new mergers where the images weren't
warped in any way.

Sam