astrolulu

The night of October 17 in my area turned out to be particularly fruitful in terms of astrophotography - thanks to exceptionally good seeing. The quality of photos details taken that night clearly exceeds what I have been able to achieve with the SCT telescope of the same 8 '' diameter - and even what I was able to get with the larger C9.25. I looked closely at my photos made so far - I've focused for example on Clavius - and I must say that this inconspicuous 8 '' Newtonian really surprised me by showing what he can do with good seeing! Here are the fruits of that amazing night:

It is exactly as you write. I finish my work in the evening, satisfied with the effects, and in the morning I would like to tear my hair out of my head - if I had anything to pluck ... I think that this can be considered as an empirical confirmation of the Theory of Relativity 🙂

Thanks, you have the same feeling as me, but while working, it's hard to decide to lose some details by resigning from sharpening or by increasing the brightness to a level that causes the brightest parts of the photo to disappear. I mean, for example, the brightly lit crater slopes, on which I always try to keep a minimal tone. Photo processing is always a struggle between the desire to show all the details that have been captured in a photo and its aesthetic dimension. I noticed that my approach to this topic is a bit like a sine wave 🙂

The last lunar landscape in this series is again a shot of the Mare Crisium. This is another photo, which I present as a comparative material, because during the processing of subsequent photos I came to the conclusion that I treated the first shot too aggressively during sharpening. I am curious about your opinion - which one is better? Here's an earlier shot:

Hi, it's very nice know that you paid attention to my photos 🙂 Maybe instead of switching to the EQ mount, it is worth looking for a GOTO drive for your dob? 1000 frames is not a bad result (I usually collect 1600) - but the drive would allow you to get enough data on a much larger frame, and this is something worth fighting for!

Meanwhile, we are approaching the end of the Very Good Seeing trip, returning to the vicinity of Langrenus and the Sea of Fertility. My favorite here is the Messier crater system - I mean the two largest craters in the team. It counts a dozen or so objects whose name reminds us of the creator of the most basic catalog of nebular objects - Charles Messier. Messier and Messier A appear morphologically related. The oblong shape of Messier, the longer axis of which marks the direction of the bright splash on the surface of Mare Fecuditatis, suggests a low-angle impact by an object that flew in from the east. After the original impact, it could bounce like a skipped stone on the water and formed a second crater - Messier A. But how to understand its shape? This crater looks like it is made up of two troughs - one deep, circular in shape, and the other, only partially visible - elliptical in shape, similar to the original Messier crater. How could such a strange formation come into being? Could it be that the Messier A circular crater is the result of an independent second impact by an object incoming this time at a high angle from above, which accidentally hit what originally resembled an oblong Messier crater?

Lucky you 🙂

Yes - but you still need to have enough strength to carry that 14 '' mirror 🙂 I recently sold my 8 '' SCT and am looking for something bigger, but I must admit that having to lift weights dampens my appetite for aperture. Unfortunately, I have made the trees cover a large chunk of the sky in my garden. I don't want to cut them out so I have to carry my whole setup quite a long way to find the right spot to observe...

Hi, the photos look very promising and the quality of detail in shots like the Rupes Recta for example seems very good for untracked photo. How many frames do you manage to collect during such a passing?

For many years I have been a fan of refractors. Even now my whole apartment is cluttered with a collection of old Japanese refractors from the 60's and 70's. I remember the shock I experienced when I first bought an 8 '' SCT telescope. At first, I was unable to get anything more than what those old, small 75mm refractors gave in the photos. After a few days, I found good seeing and the Moon was already high above the horizon. Again, I was shocked when I saw what such a telescope showed in the pictures under these conditions. The quality of the detail seemed to increase exponentially with the improvement of the observation conditions. I realized that smaller refractors can cope with poor seeing much better than large SCTs, and that this pattern is arguably the more relevant the larger the aperture. I imagine a 14 '' SCT must be extremely sensitive to seeing and height above the horizon.

Pure, sweet pleasure 🙂

Beautiful photos and great lighting. It is a pity that to take such a photo you have to wait almost until morning 🙂

Thank you very much! I admit that these domes have always attracted my attention, but in this phase, when they cast spectacular pointed shadows, there is a technical problem with them. The background surrounding them is so dark that these shadows are usually on the edge of visibility, and whether they show up turns out to depend more on the color space in which you work while processing the image, than on its brightness settings. Weirder, as a rule, you can see them better in a narrow sRGB space than in the much larger and more accurate Adobe RGB space. If you add to this the various parameters of the monitors on which the photos are viewed, the visibility of these shadows is actually a matter of a real lottery. It is a pity - because it is a very attractive detail of Mare Crisium that appeals strongly to the imagination.

We have left the Moon with the duo of Hercules and Atlas craters on the eastern (left) edge of the frame, and (closer to the terminator) the great Endymion crater, over which the Sun is just beginning to set, casting a strong shadow on the almost flat, lava-covered bottom. From this point on, we begin our further journey today, staying in the inverted positioning of the frame for ease of use. On the extension of the Endymion-Atlas line we find the Lake of Dreams - Lacus Somniorum. A "sea" too small to be called a sea, adjacent to the lava-filled polygon-like area known as the Lake of Death (Lacus Mortis), with the well-preserved Bürg Crater at the center . South of the Lake of Dreams, Posidonius attracts attention - one of the most characteristic lunar craters, immediately recognizable due to the presence of a system of ditches crossing its bottom (Rimae Pisidonius) and a "crater-eye" thats seems to wink to the observer - a small (11 km in diameter) Posidonius A. It is worth noting that Posidonius is not the only crater with a winking "eye" in these northern areas. In addition to the nearby Hercules, a similar feature can also be found in the case of the Cassini crater located in the Sea of Showers (not visible in the photo).

Mars on Tuesday. In the foreground, Syrtis Major and Hellas Planitia.

Dziękuję bardzo. Pozdrowienia dla pięknej, słonecznej Szkocji 🙂

Hi, you're absolutely right - this is the only photo in the series that was taken that evening that caused me a problem with the color. So much so that I wondered whether to show it at all. I am not sure if this rather radical color represents more the true nature of the Moon's surface, or rather the way Photoshop filters work 🙂 Is the warm, almost pink light visible on the illuminated parts of the crater walls real or is it an artifact due to the way it is processed? The worst thing is that it is impossible to verify it, because the original image coming from the camera is almost monochrome. In such a situation, it is very easy to distort when saturating - especially if you use something more than just a simple saturation slider...

Let's continue the trip that we owe to the great seeing we had on October 12, near Krakow/Poland. Mare Frigoris does not make a particularly icy impression, but the area of the Anaxagoras crater, distinguished by the brightness and blue glow of the surrounding areas covered with ejection material, evoke very icy associations. Anaxagoras (approx. 1 billion years old) lies on the edge of the much larger, older and heavily eroded Goldschmidt Crater. 4-4.5 billion years - this is the estimated age of this formation, the edge of which was heavily battered during intense space bombardments, retaining an interesting, jagged form, reminiscent of Earth's mountain ranges, to this day.

Another shot from the same evening. The Janssen and Furnerius craters area. It is worth paying attention to the Vallis Rheita - a furrow running next to the Rheita crater, which plowed the lunar surface for nearly half a thousand kilometers. In the Janssen Crater itself, the distinctive Rimae Janssen system is visible, resembling a mustache emerging from Fabricius Crater.

Another shot from the same night. Trinity: Langrenus, Vendelinus and Petavius ... And my Messier favorites:

Perfect!

Congratulations on the great scope and great, very promising results!

Thank you very much. The problem with the color of the Moon is that it is very, very delicate. When increasing saturation, any trace of chromatic aberration (e.g. from Barlow lens in a Newtonian telescope, corrector plate in SCT etc.) or atmospheric dispersion is enhanced much faster than the subtle colors of the lunar surface. I use Photoshop and its filters included in Camera Raw set. The color noise removal filter and chromatic aberration correction filters are the basic tools that allow me to be a bit bolder in my approach to color. However, each move must be supported with these filters on the principle of "two steps forward + one step back to eliminate artificial discoloration. It's hard for me to imagine what I would do without Photoshop and I understand those colleagues who are discouraged from playing with color of the Moon, not having such a tool at their disposal.

Perfect result for 8''!

Blue Aristarchus on a red background - that's what I like 🙂