Daytime moon with new webcam

[Luke]

I've been itching to try my new webcam on the moon and finally managed it yesterday during the heat of day, armed with ice cream

The top shot is three tiles of stacked webcam shots, about 150 to 225 frames per stack out of 1500 frames each.

Bizarrely, I stacked one pile in Registax and the other two in Autostakkert, and it was a bit tricky stitching, with varying degrees of sharpness and brightness.

I think the variation may have been down to thin cloud passing over at the time?

Although the clouds then stopped play, there were some beautiful strandy bits that passed over. Wish I'd photographed them!

15/07/2013

Equinox 120 / Grasshopper 3

[DrRobin]

Superb Luke. I don't know how you managed to end up with a black sky?

Robin

[robbie c]

Cracking images Luke didn't think you could get images as good as that in the day well done

[Digz]

They look great.

[WaveSoarer]

Quite brilliant.

[t_ilan_s]

Superb images! especially in the day.

[JamesF]

They look stunning. Well done.

James

[Luke]

Thanks guys!

Robin, it was a bit tricky to get the sky black as there were pixels brighter in the sky to the bottom left than on parts of the moon. So I selected the sky and bright edge of the moon where the moon pixels were brighter than the sky and used Curves to make the darker sky black. I also manually selected a few sky areas using the Lasso tool and filled those pixels with black. I did get a few jagged edges on the rim of the moon, so blurred the worst bits with a light smudge, and added a small touch of glow to the edge of the moon, which seemed to soften the transition a bit. I think the original shots had a glow but I removed it with the previous editing!

Has anyone else got other ways to do it?

[DrRobin]

Ah, so that is how it was done, very good.

You could of used a mask, basically another file with a black background and a white circle, just the same size as the moon. Feather or gradient the edges of the white circle just outside the moon's circle and then add the mask over the top of your image in another layer, setting the blend mode to darken. Note I use Paint.net but I would imagine PSP has the same functions.

What this does is anything on the mask that is white makes no difference to the picture underneath, but any area that is grey or black darkens the image underneath. Hey presto, your moon comes out as the original, the edges are feathered without loss of detail and everything else is black.

Robin