Luna Northwest - Sinus Iridium (First Lunar attempt)

My first attempt at Lunar imaging!

Date of image 10/11/2016.

Hardware details: Camera: Canon 550D in 640X480 movie crop mode 60fps. ISO 800 exposure 1/640s. Telescope: SW Skymax 150 MakCass. No filters were used and the camera was at prime focus. Mount: EQ5 Pro.  The scope was focused using a Bahtinov mask on a bright star.

The weather was good but the Moon was not visible for long before it moved behind trees. Next time I will set of the scope round the other side of the house. 

Processing was done first using Pipp. This converts .mov files to usable avi format and also performes quality filtering of the frames. I set it to keep the best 25% of the frames. I also make sure that pipp does not do any auto alignment of the frames as this messes up Registax. I then align and stack frames (the best 10% of the original 25%). The final image is sharpened by tuning the first two wavelet layers.

Comments:

Overall I am quite pleased with my first attempt. Features Such as Sinus Iridium and the Mare Imbrium show good detail. The image is not as sharp as I was expecting but this could be down to a number of reasons., but I suspect the telescope was not fully cooled to ambient temperature. I had to rush the imaging before the Moon disappeared behind trees.