A More Menacing Moon

[Stub Mandrel]

Looking at old 'coffee table' books like a binocular atlas of the moon, the images always look darker and much more 'menacing' to me. This image from last night seems to capture that feel to me, although the moon was actually very bright and sharp to the eye. Best of 21 subs, 100 asa, 1/100 and 1/250 second, gentle unsharp mask.

[xtreemchaos]

cool image mate, its hard when theres no shadow,well done.thanks for sharing.  charl.

[JamesF]

That does look to have a very natural contrast.  I think the "menacing" effect comes from over-stretching the image, especially in combination with aggressive sharpening.

James

[laudropb]

Lovely lunar photo. Thanks for posting.

[Davey-T]

"Blue Moon" tonight.

Dave

[Stub Mandrel]

I take my hat off to Astra Image - I decided to go back to the unsharpened tiff and apply lucy-richardson deconvolution. This is with the Gaussian default settings backed off a little. Blew my socks off...

[Siriusmeg]

That  is a magnificent image - so sharp and detailed.  Love it!  

[JamesF]

It is.  LR has clearly done a good job there.  I'd try to back off the brightness a bit though, I think.  I think the deconvolution has blown a few areas, particularly around Tycho.

Could be worth taking the stacked image, shifting the histogram down a bit and then applying the deconvolution?

James

[Stub Mandrel]

Great advice, James.

It's balancing act, as if I get the detail around Tycho, many small craters on dark backgrounds become exaggerated, so I processed an image as you suggest then put the original (above) on top with about 30% opacity. It's amazing how you can keep getting more out of images like this!

[JamesF]

Now that's looking more controlled and a very nice image.

James

[Astro Imp]

That last image is an absolute cracker, well done.

[DrRobin]

Very nice image. When the moon is like this there really isn't much else to look at in the night sky.

Robin