So I had some (limited) success with my astrophotography last night. It was a clear night for an hour or so and I managed to get the settings for raspistill tweaked to capture some night stars. I grabbed a couple of hundred shots and then converted those into a short video.
The settings I used for raspistill were:
raspistill -bm -tl 1000 -v -set -ISO 800 -awb off -awbg 1,1 -t 21600000 -ss 6000000 -o %06d.jpg
This created a bunch of .jpg files, but skipped tons of frames, so the numbering sequence was way out of kilter (000001.jpg, 000048.jpg, 000073.jpg etc). To fix that, and get them into a proper sequence I used a little script as follows:
I=0 for F in 0*.jpg; do echo "$F" `printf image_%06d.jpg $I` mv "$F" `printf image_%06d.jpg $I` 2>/dev/null || true I=$((I + 1)) done
Then, to convert the individual jpgs into an mp4 movie I used avconv in the libav-tools package as follows:
avconv -i image_%03d.jpg -r 5 -vf scale=1280:720 -vcodec libx264 -r 5 star-trail-$(date "+%Y%m%d-%H%M%S").mp4
