Robotic Panorama Capture - Merlin/Orion Mount
In order to get the Orion to work, you need some clever bits and pieces of hardware and software. First, the Orion obtains its information via commands it receives on its hand-controller jack which is RS-232 based. The serial port is a 5 volt TTY interface. In order to generate the necessary commands to the Orion, you need a small computer. For this task, an old Nokia 770 tablet with the hacker's 2007 edition of the OS will do. In order for the Nokia to communicate with the Orion wirelessly, you can use its Bluetooth capability. To receive the Bluetooth signal, a Parallax board can be used. The benefit of this board is that it can receive the Bluetooth commands and directly convert them into the exact TTY signal the Orion needs. Furthermore, it can consume the Orion's power right from the mount itself (8 AAs).
Once the Nokia is loaded with the Papywizard software, the commands
can be sent wirelessly
to the robotic mount over the Bluetooth paired
connection. Before collection can
begin, however, the Papywizard needs to know what you want to
capture, and the characteristics of your camera and lens. To
produce the panorama correctly, you will also need to make sure that the
camera's lens is placed over its
nodal
point. The Orion comes with a bracket that lets the camera slide
forward and backward in the portrait position making this part easy to
do. The Digital Rebel XT pictures on the right is shown with its
50mm lens in the nodal position.
If the mount is kept level, all the pictures are acquired in their correct positions, and the lighting doesn't change significantly during the collection, stitching a panorama out of all these images can still be difficult. In order for the panorama stitching process to work, it is helpful if none of the adjacent snapshots (25% to 30% overlap) contain subjects in motion. Stitching may also fail when there is not enough detail (control points) to distinguish one image from another - for example - in a large solid blue filled sky. Commercial panorama stitching software can handle most of these situations, but with a large number of images, its best to avoid as many problems as you can in the collection phase.
Small Example Sunrise 360 Gigapixel Example 360 Flash Panorama