I don’t know if this is possible, or runs into fundamental limits of sensors and photo sharpness.
I want to “pretend” that I have a fancy night sky motorized rig – through software.
- Take a few thousand 5-second exposure nigh sky pictures with a wide angle consumer camera (laying perfectly still)
- Align the images AND correct for lens distortion.
- Apply Superresolution to stack the aligned images.
- Profit!
I’ve had great success making star trails using StarStackX – no problem – but that was a straight stack-and-blend with no alignment.
I can also extract the location of the various star trails using some very brain-dead math and lots of laptop CPU time. Which feels like it should be enough to do a pretty good model of the lens distortion + atmosphere distortion… or maybe no “model”, and instead a straight transform.
Hugin and PTGui looked promising, but barfs on the number of control points I’m feeding to it.
ALTERNATIVELY – it may be impossible. If you imagine inverting the system, it would be like putting a cheap camera on a slow motorized mount, letting it take 3,000 nearly completely overlapping photos of a landscape, and then telling it “make one huge high-resolution panorama”… which AFAIK would be nearly impossible to do. I could align the photos, but I’m unaware of any stitching software that outputs significantly improved superresolution results. I’m hoping the nearly point-like light sources of stars isn’t quite as hard.