76 megapixel moon map

[12dstring]

...well half of one.

I like moon mosaics. They're fairly easy to do with modest equipment; I can get 16 megapixels on the quarter moon with my 6" newt and £10 webcam, and the moment of relief when you get to processing and realise you have no gaps is fantastic

That said, I had to take the opportunity to use a bit more aperture, so took this on Wednesday between 17:30 and 18:30 from the University of Hertfordshire observatory, Bayfordbury, Herts.

Lumenera Skynyx 2-1 at prime focus of an LX200 14".

37 videos, 500 frames of 50ms exposure at 1280x1024, best 200 of each used in final stack.

Seeing was good, certainly the best I've seen from here before midnight.

I made up a few map versions with various annotations:

Main crater names

Satellite craters and other features

Fully annotated

They were done on the first go at processing with my laptop, which crashed when I tried to save the full size...

I later reprocessed using AviStack (wavelets in Registax) and worked in 16bit, which helped to reduce the noise a bit.

Resultant full 116 megapixel version with no labels

Scale is 0.14"/pixel or 280m/pixel. The smallest features I can make out are around 1km.

And a few 50% size crops of some of my favourite regions:

Ptolemaeus, Alphonsus, Arzachel and Rupes Recta

Theophilus, Cyrillus and Catharina

Plato and Vallis Alpes

Dorsa (wrinkle-ridges) around Nicollet

Thanks for looking,

[Alan]

WOW that is fantastic

Hats off to you for such an excellent piece of work .. what a joy to zoom in to all the lunar featutes in such great detail.

Must get me one of them C14 .... in my dreams

Just brilliant!

Alan

[MikeD]

Sharp from end to end, great peice of imaging.

Mike.

[michaelmorris]

Superb! Thanks for sharing. I particularly like the labelling of satellite craters with lines connecting to the 'parent' crater - neat.

[Steve 1962]

Lovely mosaic - I like particularly the Dorsa - that's my new word for the week!

[bm1980]

very nice, like the zoom it link

Regards

Ben

[Gina]

Wonderful!

[mdstuart]

So amazing! I could spend hours looking at it..

Mark

[kev]

Wow! Great work.

[beamish]

That is a truly awesome piece of work !! Well done- looks like the seeing was exceptional !

[Chris]

Outstanding work, that really is something else! and isn't the Bayfordbury Observatory great , I pretty much lived in one of the domes for my final year project back in the day. Is Bob Forrest still working their?

[12dstring]

Thanks guys

My previous mosaics were done in the early hours of the morning when the seeing usually calms down, but I've never know it so good at 6pm. There were student practicals on Tuesday and Thursday using the same setup to image the moon and Jupiter, the seeing was good for both of them but perhaps a little better on Weds.

I've uploaded one of the videos so you can see how it looked:

Outstanding work, that really is something else! and isn't the Bayfordbury Observatory great , I pretty much lived in one of the domes for my final year project back in the day. Is Bob Forrest still working their?

Unfortunately Bob retired a year ago, we still miss him. But it's in good hands, and lots of students this year so the observatory is being used plenty.

What project did you do there?

[jam1e1]

Great work!

[Stargazing_Cliff]

They pretty awesome like the super close images

[Bulla]

Fantastic work, thumbs up

[zedds]

Great work. Fantastic detail.

[Zul]

Stunning!!

[laser_jock99]

Amazing work. Would like one of those C14's......

[Proto]

Amazing! particularly enjoy the one of the Plato and Vallis Alpes, brilliant bit of perspective with the shadows!

[kiffy]

So amazing! I could spend hours looking at it.

i have done! this is brilliant...

i have to ask, how much time did you put into this?

[bigal1]

Amazing mosaic had a good close look and the detail / resolution is superb well done

[Karlos]

Fantastic, I just zoomed in and something in my head assumed that I would see an end to the detail- But NO. This is a brilliant image completely sharp all across. Thanks for sharing

[barkis]

Quite an exceptional job you've accomplished producing this mosaic.

Congratulations .

Ron

[Chris]

Hi Dave,

My project title was "Variable Star Photometry - Testing the Bayfordbury Site" I basically wanted to see if the Bayfordbury observatory was capable of professional photometric research. As a warm up I took various light curves of variable stars and compared the results to the published research. Then I moved onto the recently discovered exoplanet transit of HD209458b and produced a light curve for this and again compared the results to the very recently published data, I got an A3 for the project plus the Chris Kitchen Uni prize for best use of the observatory (I wonder if they still do this prize) it was quite funny because the prize was a modest 20 quid, and I didn't ever receive it he he, got to love Hert's

[12dstring]

That sounds interesting, there's a few people here wanting to give exoplanet transits a go. We're setting up one of the telescopes to work robotically at the moment and lots of the requests are for photometry.

Snap! I got the Chris Kitchin prize in 2010, I have no reason to believe someone didn't get it last year..

i have to ask, how much time did you put into this?

The actual imaging was about an hour (including a dash inside to get my coffee). I used batch processing in Registax and AviStack so just let it run overnight both times. With my mosaics I prefer to use big overlaps (~1/2 frame) and stitch them together manually. It took 2-3 hours for each process but because most surface features are then covered by two or more frames you can erase the bits with the worst seeing and use the better ones. It helps to compensate for any seeing variability and leads to a slightly sharper image than if it was all blended automatically.