Daylight Moon, 6th October

[JamesF]

Not done one of these for a few weeks. I think I need to work on the camera settings a bit to reduce the noise, but I'm quite pleased with the level of detail. I started with 120 subs of 1/1000th @ ISO400 from my 450D and 127 Mak, stacked just over half of them at a 97% quality level and finished off with a bit of tweaking of levels in Photoshop.

James

[Ganymede12]

Brilliant detail, especially on a daytime moon!

[spektrumdx8]

Pic looks amazing- sorry,but only being an amateur photographer, what do you mean by noise?

Looks focused and lots of detail to my 52 year old eyes !!

[Bizibilder]

That is an exellent daytime Moon - very good contrast - well done.

[JamesF]

Thank you both.

The flat areas of sky look quite "grainy" to me in the larger version. Certainly more than I'd like. My gut feeling is that's down to insufficient exposure not allowing the sensor the time it needs at the chosen shutter speed, so you get random noise from the electronics coming through in the image. I think I need to experiment a bit with exposure and shutter speed to see if I can get a better result.

James

[JamesF]

Thank you both.

All three of you, in fact. I seem to be having trouble counting. Perhaps that's why I'm struggling with the exposure

James

[JonH]

That's a lovely shot, well done.

[bm1980]

Very nice James, i love obserivng the daytime moon.

Regards

Ben

[Stargazer33]

Really nice shot James!

I was thinking of imaging the moon today but got caught up with the ironing. Should have left it for this evening as the clouds have arrived on cue and so no observing tonight again!

Great level of detail you are getting from a 127 Mak and in daylight too! I've got to stop faffing about and get out and do some observing.

Bryan

[JamesF]

I'm finding it quite a challenge, I have to admit. I don't know if it's the reduced contrast or the fact that it's a colour rather than monochrome image, but I find it a lot harder to produce an acceptable result compared with shots taken at night.

James

[BuzzBomb]

Very nice shot James. I wonder if mono would be the answer?

Sent from my GT-I9001 using Tapatalk 2

[astrosphinx]

Hi James, lovely image, as for the noise did it exaggerate as part of your PS processing, you could create a mask so only the moon image is sharpened. Of course if you only adjusted levels then the noise would have been there at capture but ISO400 doesn't usually present that much noise.

[JamesF]

Very nice shot James. I wonder if mono would be the answer?

I had wondered about that. I'm quite keen to stick with full colour though, because actually the sky often has a colour gradient from one side of the frame to the other and I think it might look odd if it were too flat.

James

[JamesF]

Hi James, lovely image, as for the noise did it exaggerate as part of your PS processing, you could create a mask so only the moon image is sharpened. Of course if you only adjusted levels then the noise would have been there at capture but ISO400 doesn't usually present that much noise.

Thank you. I only tweaked levels in Photoshop, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen (or become exaggerated, perhaps) at some other point in processing. Some experimentation is required I think, though just being able to see the moon would be a bonus right now

James

[Cath]

oooo nice image James!

I like colour myself, even though the moon is mainly grey.

[JonH]

I hope you don't mind me sticking my oar in, but I think it would benefit from a little more processing - an increase in contrast in both the shadows and highlights, a reduction in blue on the moon to lift it from the background and a little darkening of the sky. There's quite a bit of noise in the sky which is perhaps too much for a noise reduction layer so if it were mine, I'd probably drop a correctly exposed sky on top.

Here's a quick n dirty version done on my laptop.

[JamesF]

Not at all Jon, thanks for the ideas. I think it definitely works. I'll try to duplicate what you've done for myself when I have a few moments today.

James