Yesterday night was the first night with few clouds, and did a test run with the Canon A470, and the chdk very long expose (up to 60 seconds), script, with low ASA (to reduce noise).
Not perfect, there was a lot of moon making one area very bright. This should be better when there is no moon, further allowing exposure increase. It takes a few pictures for teh auto exposure to stabilize :-)
Had to scale the images down to 1400 x 1050 pixels so the movie would actually display, further losses in compression: ftp://panteltje.com/pub/ahr.avi (16.7 MB).
Seems I caught a falling star or flying bird? at about 45 seconds... The time lapse was 1 minute, this will play at 1 second per frame.
Not bad for that cheapo camera, it is all in the software :-) The sensor is very good, very little noise, but some compression artefacts.
For the Linux users: This is how the avi was made, from the camera jpegs For each jpg, from a script: convert -resize 1920x1050 nnn.jpg nnn.jpg This processes 1375.jpg to 1417.jpg: jpg_to_mjpegtools_yuv -f 1357 -l 1417 -s 1 > q1.yuv ffmpeg -i q1.yuv -vcodec mjpeg -sameq -r 1 -y ahr.avi
I wrote jpg_to_mjpegtools_yuv, it is available from here: