120 Pane Moon Mosaic

[Tommy B]

The moon is a fickle beast ever changing its luminosity and visability but a few nights ago I risked freezing conditions without appropriate thermal wear in an attempt to capture a super massive moon mosaic.

The first attempt went horribly wrong resulting in a huge swathe of missing frames which was really unfortunate as seeing was pretty good!

2 days later I took steps to correct my mistakes and began shooting 30 second videos with a Phillips spc900 webcam. I took 120 videos and stacked them in registax 5 which were then pieced together manually in photoshop with copius amounts of blending.

I had hoped to acheive a huge high detail image of the moon that I could then take to a printers and get printed at an epic scale and still look fantastic....however, the seeing was so so bad that the final frames were super blurry. In the interest of practice I decided to stitch them together anyhow and see what I got.

Below is the end result which I'm quite pleased with despite it not having the desired super clarity when zoomed in.

I also did an inverted version as I think the moon responds really well to this effect.

Thanks for looking

Tommy B.