AstroRoad

Hi John, Nice shots! Just getting into this myself and was wondering if you were using exposure bracketing at all, and if so was it showing any advantage to captured dynamic range?

Thanks everyone for the replies, I'll certainly have a look at lucky imaging. I had read some bits and pieces about stacking frames, though I wasn't entirely sure how much this applied to lunar. I guess I'm about to find out, though the vintage of my Sony cameras isn't going to do me a great deal of favors in terms of video capability. I actually have a little Panasonic GX85 that can do 4k 24p, other than that it is FHD at 60FPS or the Sony cameras at FullHD 30fps. Something more to get my head around, guess I'll be off to the lunar forums to get myself up to speed on the post processing side of things. Thanks again.

Hi All, I've done a fair bit of untracked landscape astro photography over the past few years (12mm - 50mm focal lengths), and during the last few months my interest in taking close up high quality moon photography suitable for large print has really started to develop. I shoot on a Sony A7S and A7R , so no standard telephoto lens is going to give me the reach I want. I used stellarium to simulate focal length and I think around 1500mm is where I want to be at the wide end. Because I have very limited funds my thoughts were to by a used telescope now that is compact and lightweight enough to mount on my existing tripod which has a head load capacity of about 6kg (tripod is about 15kg from memory). Once my hobby funds recover in a year or so I could then look to get a heavy tripod / equatorial mount I can grow into a bit for extended and accurate tracking. I aware this hobby could develop into something more, so want to get as much ongoing value as I can from my purchasing decisions. Optical quality of the scope is my biggest consideration as I want to be able to produce large prints. As such I *think* most refractor scopes in my price range ($500aud at most) are not suitable as I understand it I should be looking at an ED Doublet or APO scope for CA minimisation as well as needing a high quality Barlow lens (for magnification) and matched field flattener (lens curvature correction). That route seemed to quickly escalate out of my price range. I'm currently have an eye on getting myself a used Skywatcher 102/1300 mak which will put me in the focal range ball park I'm looking for and is also very compact and lightweight (about 2kg I think). Not a particularly fast scope, however optically the images taken with this scope of the moon I've seen look very decent. Unless I get lucky with a used scope that includes a good quality Barlow, I was thinking I could look at getting a good quality 2.5x or 3x Barlow down the track a bit for getting those really close up shots I'm looking for. Would really appreciate any feedback or advice on my direction for my intended use case. It's all a lot to take in and some of the $$ involved are a bit mind boggling to someone with pretty limited funds and high expectations 🤪.