Dirty moon - 20/08/2013

[Luke]

I wasn't sure whether to image the moon last night or not. There was patchy cloud around earlier in the eve, but I put the scope out to cool down just in case. It had cleared up nicely when I checked later.

I used my low hassle setup and took about 1,000 frames. I stacked about 600 of the frames in Autostakkert 2, which seemed like a high percentage, but the Quality Graph looked good in AS.

The inverted version makes the moon look dirty/sooty to me. I've enjoyed playing around with inverted images of the sun, so wanted to give the moon a go.

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20/08/2013

Celestron Onyx 80mm / Grasshopper 3 (ICX687) / Undriven Giro III mount

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Neat set of shots, with lots of detail. That inverted image is quite psychedelic

[Luke]

More daftness

[Moonshane]

I love the au naturelle shot best. it's superb.

[JamesF]

Very nice image. The inverted version is quite interesting. It seems to show up colour variations that you don't tend to spot in the "normal" one.

James

[JamesF]

More daftness

Looks like one of those light pollution images of the Earth

James

[David Smith]

Agree with James on the inverted image, it does somehow highlight the features well.

Very good Luke.

[Luke]

Thanks, folks.

James, the light pollution effect is what I thought of when I was playing around trying to reduce the highlights a bit and got an effect like that. I've started playing around with a full blown "light pollution" pic of the moon with the rays casting some light, but am having trouble separating the rays. I hope it will look pretty if I can get it to work.

Ooops, I just suggested light pollution looks pretty in an astro forum...

[andyman]

SUPERB

[eli71]

Nice shot , and I love too the "artistics" ones, always interesting to see things in a different way

[Superdavo]

Wow! That must've had a lot of waveletting done to it! (Still, if you stack 600 frames, you can afford to)

David

[Luke]

Wow! That must've had a lot of waveletting done to it! (Still, if you stack 600 frames, you can afford to)

David

The 600 frames did let me go wild with unsharp mask

I used to think that a stacked image was supposed to look sharper and more detailed than the individual frames, and I got disheartened when the stack looked blurry, not the big improvement I was expecting. What I didn't realise then is that you can sharpen the stacked image much more than any individual frame. Or at least, that's what seems to be the case?

[Iancovici]

B e a utifully taken!

[Andrew*]

The 600 frames did let me go wild with unsharp mask

I used to think that a stacked image was supposed to look sharper and more detailed than the individual frames, and I got disheartened when the stack looked blurry, not the big improvement I was expecting. What I didn't realise then is that you can sharpen the stacked image much more than any individual frame. Or at least, that's what seems to be the case?

That's incredible!

Very nice lunar images.

The "lunar light pollution" one is great and really highlights the highlights... if you know what I mean. Looking forward to the revision.

[jammo]

The first image is unbelievable so much detail, makes the one i took the other night look bad

Very nicely done Luke