Imaging and Processing the Moon

[russellhq]

I've just started out imaging the moon (but not imaging itself), this is probably my second shot of it. I had the camera set at ISO400 and 1/2000 shutter. I took 100 shots, processed in PIPP before stacking and then adjusted in Photoshop.

Any and all comments welcome for improving my technique!

[cgarry]

That is a great detailed image, well done. I find that with the moon, it is very easy to clip the highlights when sharpening and it looks to me that you image might suffer from this a tiny bit. Though processing is a personal thing and some people accept their lunar images are clipped at the top end if it brings out more detail elsewhere in the histogram.

Cheers,

Chris

[rfdesigner]

That's pretty good.

To get the sharpening accurate (rather than just 'well that looks nice'), what I do in IRIS is take a 'slice' at the limb. This means I get a little graph of the brightness from the background to the beginning of the moon propper. In theory the background brightness should be flat then you should see a clean cliff up to the beginning of the moon, but in any raw shot it never is. By using wavelets and lots of trial and effort I manipulate the various wavelet strengths so as to flatten the black background without making any values below the average background level, and give as near to a 90 degree angle to the rising cliff.

The face of the moon then turned out to be nice and sharp without being 'over-processed'... this is what I did for my moon image in my gallery here: https://sites.google.com/site/southwiltshireastro/gallery

just one of many methods.

Derek