Lunar Mosaic 13/03/2017

Date: 13/03/2017

Image: A mosaic of panels covering part of the eastern limb of the Moon. The southern panels cover part of Mare Fecunditatis and Mare Spumans. The more northern panels cover Mare Undarum, Mare Margins and some of the crater Naper. These images were taken as the scope was cooling down to image Jupiter. As a result, the stacks are a bit soft and I may have pushed the wavelets a bit hard to show detail. Anyway, this is still an area of the Moon I have not imaged before so it is being added to the collection!

Scope and optics and mount: Skywatcher Skymax 150 Maksutov Cassagrain (Fl = 1800mm, F/D = 12). The focal length was doubled using a Televue 2X Barlow giving a focal length around 3600mm and F/D ~ 24. I used a Baader fringe killer to remove residual chromatic aberration. The mount was an EQ5 Pro with an extension pillar.

Camera: Cannon 550D in 640X480 movie crop mode at 60 frames/s. ISO 100, exposure = 1/60 seconds. Each movie was about 4 minutes long.

Processing: Movies were decompressed and filtered in Pipp, keeping the best 2000 frames, no image stabilisation was used. The decompressed file was then sent to Registax, frames were aligned and only the frames with > 90% quality were stacked, the number of used frames therefore changed for each stack. I then increased the Gaussian wavelets using 80 (1.3), 20 (1.15), 5 (1), altered the Gamma curve, aligned the RGB balance and stretched the histogram to cover 0 - 225. The mosaic was completed using Gimp.