Imaging the moon with a Skyliner 200p dobsonian.

[Ganymede12]

Taken on the 27th and the 29th of September, 2012, using a Skyliner 200p dobsonian, 2 moon filters, a Fujifilm finepix Z5 on a PH047 Ultra Afocal Digital Camera Support. Edited with GIMP2.

Large and unedited versions can be viewed here:

Let me know what you think and how I can improve!

[Ganymede12]

Here's a better full moon shot.

How can I improve?

[Digz]

A great start. I must get back out and shoot the moon at some point.

What areas do you exactly want to improve on?

[Ganymede12]

Anything! If you see something I can do even slightly better, then I would like to know about it!

[Ganymede12]

How hard would it be to make a lunar mosaic? What would I have to do?

[tich]

My first full moon mosaic well ok it was 99% full I used my Philips webcam & did 260 frames via sharcap on specific points until I got all fo the moon done. I then stacked all the images in registax & stitched them together using microsoft ICE. I did some tweaks in photoshop just to sharpen up the image & adjust the colour curve & that was pretty much it. My 200P is on an NEQ6 pro mount so not sure if you can do all this while manually tracking a dob as I've never owned one. But I'm sure someone will be able to verify any other pointers. Just another tip while recording the videos just make sure you dont have it to bright or it can end up looking over exposed.

The end result I got was this;

I like your moon shots the full moon is a nice one & far better than my first attempts...

Both taken with an HTC Wildfire at the eyepiece.

[Digz]

Anything! If you see something I can do even slightly better, then I would like to know about it!

hmmmm, does your camera have any manual settings? Generally it would be good to try and keep the ISO down to reduce noise, although with a compact camera this may not always work.

If your camera records avi files give that a blast - then you can stack the avi's with registax or similar. This may help you get sharper images but will be an additional learning curve.

How hard would it be to make a lunar mosaic? What would I have to do?

With a mosaic you could try either single shots of a section of the moon or avi's as above stacked to give you a single shot of a section. Try and cover the whole moon in sections and ensure a sufficient overlap in sections to help stitching. Each section can then be stitched together with Microsoft ICE, which I think is a free to download program for making panoramics (the principle is the same).

HTH

[Tabciogaraj]

Good, please add full image (no resized)

[Ganymede12]

Which one do you want to see in full form? They can be viewed in my gallery.