South-western lunar terminator 28/03/2018

South-western lunar terminator, 28/03/2018.

Comments: This is a quick scan of the region mainly to provide an example image following some star tests. I also dropped the camera recently and wanted to check everything was all right!

The main features here are Mare Humorum and the crater Gassendi at its north edge. The thin shadow at Gassendi’s eastern wall is very nice. West of Mare Humorum is the deeper crater Mersenius stronger shadows highlight its relief. Further south and right on the terminator is the large crater Schickard just a small shaft of light is able to graze its floor. If I had more time I would have done a time-lapse showing the illumination growing through the night.

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

Mount: SW EQ5 pro with extension pillar.

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

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 around 100 points. The best 90% of the frames (using the Registergraph) were kept and stacked. The final image was enhanced by amplifying the first three wavelets by 50, 10, and 2 respectively. Drizzle 2x was also used.

Full .tiff also attached

Mosaic.tiff