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10 day old Moon terminator mosaic


spaceman_spiff

This was just a quick Lunar imaging session since I had a friend over. The Moon was about 10 days old the terminator extended from north to south from Philolaus and J. Herschel down past the Sinus Iridium and Mare Imbrium to Oceanus Procellarum with Kepler (I also took an extra image of nearby Copernicus). The terminator then passes the Mare Humorum and the great multi-walled Gassendi before going south to the contrasty crater Schiller and finally onto my favourite crater Clavius. 

Telescope: SW 150mm F12 Mak-Cass. With a Baader fringe killer filter.

Camera: Canon EOS 550D in 60 frames/s movie crop mode, ISO 200, exposure 1/60s. I took 3 minute recordings for each image (10800 frames).

Processing: Movies were initially processed in Pipp, keeping the best 2000 frames and decompressing them. The decompressed frames were then passed to Registax aligned using 100 points. The best 90% of the frames (using the Registergraph quality measure) were kept and stacked. The final image was enhanced by amplifying the first three wavelets by 80, 20, and 5 respectively. The Gamma was reduced to 0.8.

Comments: I only had a short time available to cover the terminator this time but I had a lot of fun doing it! As the telescope cooled down, its performance improved dramatically. I actually went back to the northern region after about 90 minutes and took some movies for comparison. The results were much sharper but I could not use them in the mosaic because the focal point of the scope had changed and the images were a slightly different scale. It serves as a reminder to always capture nearby regions together instead of scanning across the Moon linearly. I was also impressed at the ease of focusing: I could not use a Bhatinov mask until the stars came out well into the imaging session so I just focused until the Moon was as sharp as possible... When I checked my focusing later I was spot on! I constantly refocused throughout the session because the scope was still cooling down.

Credit

D Elijah

Copyright

© D Elijah

From the album:

Lunar work

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Very nice - how large is your full res image? Large is showing 604x1200 - that can't be it...? I'd be interested to see more.

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Thanks furrysocks!

Your right about the resolution...The image was down-sampled when I uploaded it. Each panel is about 1280x980 and the mosaic itself is about 4400x8800 pixels. I'm not sure how to upload a large image without the compression happening.

The original is much sharper as you can imagine!

Dan :happy7:

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