Using HandyAvi and almost any webcam you can make time-lapse, motion-detect, meteor trail, or planetary movies.

Time-lapse movies let you speed things up such as flowers opening up or clouds moving in the sky.
Motion-detect frames are captured only when something moves.
Use your webcam with a telescope.
HandyAvi contains a full set of Meade telescope controls.
HandyAvi has built-in AVI movie viewer.
HandyAvi has built-in movie editing features.

Time-lapse movies let you speed things up such as flowers opening up or clouds moving in the sky. Use it to see what happens when ice melts. Capture building construction, sunsets, moon rise, plants growing, bird growing up in a nest... Use HandyAvi with a microscope to show crystal growth or speed up the movements of an amoeba. Create time-lapse movies showing cell division.

Motion-detect movies let you leave out boring stuff. For example, you could point the webcam at your yard and instead of getting a really LONG movie showing your unchanging yard, you'd get a much shorter movie showing only the things that HAPPENED in your yard, such as a dog or cat walking through.

If you were to point the camera at a bird feeder, the movie would only show the scenes where birds were present and moving about. HandyAvi motion-detect is also ideal for surveillance applications.

Planetary movies are oriented toward the amateur astronomy community. You would usually take these types of movies through a telescope. Most webcams are sensitive enough to allow you to make images of the moon, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

HandyAvi contains a full set of Meade telescope controls so that both the webcam and the telescope can be controlled remotely. Typically, movies created this way are then processed with a freeware program such as RegiStax to produce extremely high-quality still images.

Meteor trail imaging is a new and exciting feature of HandyAvi that lets you point a webcam at that sky at night and capture meteor trails. HandyAvi will capture frames that precede the "trigger event" (a frame where the meteor is bright enough to cause the trail to be recorded) and also frames that follow the "trigger event."

This means that the WHOLE trail will be captured. HandyAvi suppresses "false trigger events" so that camera noise, star scintillation, stars drifting slowly across the field, etc. do not cause images to be recorded. The file produced after a night of imaging will be very small, containing only events that pass the sophisticated "trigger event" tests. The meteor trail imaging mode can also be used to capture lightning during storms, airplane trails, satellite passes...

Limitations:

· 10 days evaluation period
· nag screen