wouterdhoye

Hi, Despite the fact I had to get up very early and that it was pretty cold I'm happy I did get out of bed to aquire the below image. (click thumbnail) Seeing conditions were not quite optimal though the final result came out quite well. the floor of Mare imbrium shows many little craterlets and Sinus iridum shows plenty of detail. Enjoy the image. Wouter.

I did try with an IR filter too.. result was not better.. so I opted for the better s/n ration of the orange filter. Wouter.

Have fun with the new setup 👍

Hi, Yesterday evening, just before clouds started to roll in i was able to shoot (among others) this image of Pythagoras. Conditions were far from ideal with rather bad seeing and some thin clouds passing. Nonetheless Pythogoras here, also thanks to good librations turned out pretty well. The crater shows it's delicate terraces and a well defined central peaks. The peaks also cast a nice shadow over the crater floor. The crater has a diameter around 130km and is about 5000m deep. The central peaks rise about 1500m above the crater floor. The crater walls rise up about 1000m above the surrounding terrain. Click the thumbnail for full res image. Enjoy. Wouter.

Lovely set of images. Well done 👍 Wouter.

Lovely images. I think the ones with heavy saturation my need a little more work to get best color balance. For instance the last one still has a blue sky background. Nonetehless, a very fine sseries of images. Wouter.

Oh my.. That worked out quite good. great image 👍 Wouter.

Nice image. And you caught Lunar X and V 👍 Wouter.

No, autostakkert does not have sharpening tools. All autostakkert does is create a stacked image prepared for further processing. You can use registax for sharpening. Clean optics are good. Though some dirt on the corrector plate will hardly affect the image quality. wouter

Hi, For lunar imaging there is no need to keep gain very low. I usually use a gain (in firecapture) between 200 and 300. I don't know the values in Sharpcap. But you can use a relatively high gain. At f/20 this results in exposure times around 5-10ms. Regarding focusing I would recommend to focus on a dark crater rim, and pay attention to small illuminated details in the dark rim. When you see these best you have reached best focus. I would not advise to use the lunar rim. Regarding the artifacts, I'm a bit puzzled... Maybe you used too high compression when saving the images (jpeg compression can do this) unless these artifacts were already visible in the raw stacked images. I have seen it happen to some of my images in autostakkert. Wouter.

Lovey image, Avani. And I have to agree even if you revisit a region, it always looks lightly different. The intricate play of shadows combined with librations always makes for a different image. Thanks for sharing. Wouter.

Hi Neil. I believe you can't go really wrong with the 180 Mak. However, a C9.25 is not that far out of your budget. And especially for imaging the extra aperture will make a difference. For visual use the difference will depend mostly on how often the seeing is good enough the allow the C9.25 to perform well. I don't know your budgetary constraints, though If I would have to make the decision I'd save up a little for the extra aperture. The C9.25 is a known value for lunar/planetary imaging. The 8" classic cassegrains are an option however their only real advantage is the open tube design allowing faster cooldown. Note however that a classic cassegrain is trickier to collimate than a SCT. Central obstruction is similar to a regular SCT (33%) so in theory similar performance to a regular SCT is to be expected. The only real advantage they have to me, is that they have a crayford focuser as standard instead of a primary mirror focuser on the SCT's. For optimal results and convenience I would also suggest you allocate some budget to a decent electronic focuser. Focusing is really critical for high res imaging. So if you can focus without introducing any vibration that will make it a lot easier. Wouter.

Hi Neil, Before making some advice I'd first like to know a few things. One thing you answered already. The telescope will be permanently set up. So here are my next questions. 1) What's your budget? (It's too easy to spend other people's money 😉) 2) What mount will you put the new telescope on? And do you have this mount or is it incorporated in the budget of question 1? 3) What will be the prime use? Visual or photographic. as I believe the needs for visual althoug similar are not exactly the same) Wouter.

Hi, Although the images look nice from a distance I believe that upon closer inspection your telescope should be able to show more details. The images appear a tad soft/unsharp. Maybe you had plain horrible seeing or the focus was not spot on. Can you also tell a bit more about how you acquired the images, and about your processing? The top image also shows some strange artifact patterns. Maybe that's due to compression but these artifacts (whatever cause them) wash out all possible detail. I included a blown up screenshot illustrating the issue. The other images do not appear to show this issue. The good things about your images: good tonality and dynamic range, with only a few burnt highlights. Good overall contrast showing plenty of mare floor albedo differences. I hope I'm not being too harsh. If possible I'm more than willing to help you get the most out of your equipment. Wouter.

Hi, cloudy nights, moon too low to image, so time to hone the processing skills a bit. I repocessed my most recent Clavius image. the difference as opposed to my previous imaging was that I used 1,5x drizzle in AS!3 (and the first time I got AS!3 to work on my mac). other processing is still the same. Click the thumbnail to open the technical file and compare both images. I'm quite curious for your opinions. I belive the details captured are much tighter and better defined in the new revision. Kind regards, Wouter.

Below a movie showcasing my images from september. Sit back and enjoy. Feel free to share your comments. Clear skies, Wouter.

Sweet image. I'm not sure wetehr JPEG or PNG makes too much of a difference. but this is a nice picture anyway. Wouter.

A lovely image. Well done!

Hi, Nice first effort. I've made a couple of large moon mosaics already and it is important to first scan the surface and set your exposure right for the brightest parts. And don't touch it afterwards. So use the same setting for the entire surface. Areas that are a bit dark can be brightened at the cost of a bit of noise. But saturated parts can not be recovered in any way. I usually make sure that the brightest parts in my movies are not brighter than 80% saturation or so. This also give some headroom for sharpening, which often also can result in clipped highlights. Wouter.

Single panes. Though the Mare Nectaris one and the Rupes Altaï image could be combined to a two-pane moasic. Wouter.

Hi, Below the last few iamges made in September. Click thumbnails to view larger image. Posidonius Mare Nectaris Rupes Altaï, Fracastorius, Piccolomini Enjoy, feel free to share your comments. Wouter.

Sweet image, and indeed, the terminator is always worth exploring. Even some fetures are worth imaging when the sun is high above the lunar horizon. Albedo features like ray systems and micro impacts in mare are interesting when the sun is high.

A lovely image. Well done, especially for a first lunar image. Wouter.

I'm all in for highly saturated colors. Second oen for me. Well done. Wouter.

That's Catena Davy. it's a series of impacts. Most likely caused by a meteorite that's been ripped apart by gravitation. Comaprable to what happenend with Shoemaker levy 9 when it fell apart when pulled in by Jupiter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_(crater) Wouter.