If you don’t have very good control over your manual settings, or you can’t get a lot of images to stack, one solution that a lot of people use is to say “screw it” and just take a video. Usually, the power of the camera drops somewhat by going to video, but what you lack in initial power, you make up for when you take a video. For the ISO comparison, I shot the moon. Some of the manual controls in Camera FV-5 were overriding each other, but still, one way around a lot of short burst images is to do a video. Since Camera FV-5 doesn’t support video directly, I used the companion app, Cinema FV-5.

I shot one of the moon for 90s, and then ran it through the PIPP processor plus Auto-Stakkert. Here is the result, compared with the original single-shot earlier:

Single shot	Video processed and stacked

Obviously, something went wrong in the stacking process somewhere, which is part of the challenge of using videos — you have to convert them essentially into frames and then stack them one on top of another to get an image. More art than science at times and I didn’t go back to find the problem, partly as I’m lazy and partly as it is a bit overkill for a moon shot when the original has a fair amount of detail. If you want more than that, use a real camera!

I also did one of Jupiter for 80s, same processing:

No better than I had done earlier, although the relatively perfect roundness of the planet hints at the power of stacking if you can capture one in the first place that isn’t washed out.

And one of Spica, a single star, for 10s, same processing:

Not very exciting, but it can be done. Normally it would be done with larger fields, but well, my camera doesn’t do that. This is about the best I can get.

One nice feature that some people might like in the Camera FV-5 app is a built-in intervalometer. The setting is available from the Shooting Utilities menu on the main screen (looks like a histogram/landscape image of a mountain), and within that menu, is located as the second icon from the right (next to BRK). The symbol looks like the timer icon but says INT in small letters under it.

The shooting modes available let you choose:

a. Interval + total shots i.e. how often to take a pic and how many photos in total;

b. Interval + shooting duration;

c. Interval+ playback duration i.e. if you turn it into a GIF or video;

d. Shooting + playback duration i.e. if you want to essentially later create a slow-motion or compressed video;

e. Shooting duration + the total number of shots i.e. it will figure out how often to take pics.

For AP, you’re likely to stay in the first one…how far apart to take the shots (likely low number of 1 or 2 seconds) and how many photos in total (100+ is common). Your maximum number of shots is theoretically unlimited (it let me put in 10M shots for instance), but going much above several thousand is going to suck your battery dry and eat up your memory. The interval range is between 1 and 3600 seconds (1s up to 1h).

I ran 100 shots through, but for some reason, the app set my shots on Jupiter at ISO 1000 again, basically guaranteeing an overwhelming whiteout of the planet. Stacking that 100 times doesn’t really help with that, it just makes it worse in many ways. The app just didn’t give me enough control to bypass that on the first go.

Here’s the result, compliments of AutoStakkert:

Nothing special there. But at least Camera FV-5 has the function, something a lot of other apps don’t, and a key tool that most astrophotographers need. Saves having to press the button 100 times too. 🙂