How did I compress the videos for the Internet?
The pictures with the videos are so called "animated gifs", a series of gif pictures in one file. Gifs are compressed better if there are big areas with the same colour in it.
For getting the best compression results, I covered the area, which contains only black sky (and there- fore the noise of the CCD chip), with a black mask. In the video on the right I coloured the mask brown, so that you can see it. This trick avoids that the background noise disturbs the compression. The only reason to do this is getting a file of acceptable size for your browser to download.
Well, the result you can see on the right. Because of the compression to an animated gif, the speed of the satellite appears slower than in reality.

Areas with noise I covered with black.
Here I coloured the cover brown for you.

This is my procedur:
(takes about 30 minutes for a film now):

1. Recording the flare with a Canon DMMV1 (see a picture and come back with the back-button of your browser)
2. Transfering the video in the computer with a video-in card and a video editing software (the result is an avi-file of about 18 MB!)
3. Cutting with the video editing software, so that the most relevant scene remains
4. Exporting the video as numbered bmp-files (about 180 files of each 55 kB what means still a sum of about 10 MB!)
5. Importing the bmp-series into a multimedia authoring tool. Here I include the the masks moving with the flare and the description
6. Exporting again a series of bmp
7. Using a software for animated gifs to creat the final files for the website. The result is gif-file of about 130kB

I want to encourage you to do it yourself! Maybe you find another method for compression. But certainly some of you have a better camera which can record also fainter stars than I can.

Go back
to selection.