Photograping the moon..

[TROJAN]

I am new to Astrophotography and just starting out on a very steep learning curve... Below are the four attempts I have made at taking shots of the moon -

I have a Skywatcher explorer 200p on an EQ5 mount.. I have an EQ6 but have not really had the time to set it all up as yet... This first shot was taken after I unpacked the scope and before I had any means of attaching my DSLR to the scope.. I basically held my mobile phone up to the eyepiece and this was the result...

The next shot was taken on 20 the October 2011 once my Nikon T Ring arrived and I was able to screw my Nikon D50 to the telescope... Here I used a 2x Barlow however I did not have a camera remote - this caused the images to be fuzzy and not sharp.. Also I didnt put the pictures through photoshop or similar....

on 1st November I went out again - this time I used a remote control for the camera.. seemed to make a lot of difference... I played around with both the camera speed settings and the aperture and this was just about the best picture... however the colour wasnt quite right .

I went out again on 4th November.. I took hundreds of frames of the moon using the camera remote. I settled with an Iso of 800 and a shutter speed of 250 and an aperture of 3.5 (f stop). I chose this next frame as being the best and put the photo through picture project using the sharpen tool..

Although happy with the photo I then decided to stack 30 of the best frames from the shoot on 4th November through Registax - I then sharpened the stacked image using the wavelength tool.. and ended up with this... I will get photoshop and deepsky stacker and try those as my next project... In the meantime Im looking forward to the skies clearing for another go.........

[bigal1]

Nice collection of images you got there well done and stick at it

[Quatermass]

Going very well Trojan, your right its a steep learning curve but your heading on the right track for sure. I have hundreds of photos of the moon from last year it was great fun and led me to a much deeper understanding of its many interesting features. Have a look at this video on doing a moon mosaic I'm sure you will find it helpful for later on

How to image the Moon | Sky at Night Magazine