Moon Mosaic - 15th December

[themos]

(click to enlarge)

Sorry about the upside-down-ness, didn't think to preprocess before the stitching. The watermark shows the software I used, PTGui. I have to say it's superior to Imerge.

There's 44 shots in that one. Here comes the science bit: I used the 12" f/5 Dob, a 25 mm Plossl, the Ultra Deluxe camera support (thanks Andrew!) and the A540 PowerShot Canon. Focus at infinity, ISO 100, 1/40 second exposure at f/8, fixed "Sunlight" colour balance, full zoom.

I am rather pleased with it. So pleased, that I just might buy PTGui...

[legion48]

Nice one mate.

[Starflyer]

That's an impressive mosaic - 44 shots :shock:

Loads of detail and lovely colour, great stuff.

Cheers,

Ian

[jcm]

Looks good to me.

Do you think the Pro version of PTGui is worth the extra cost?

John

[themos]

Yes, there's 44 but I was shooting some "triplets" (taking three at a time, they showed the movement of the moon nicely). I thought that was a good test of PTGui's ability to stretch and squish the images to fit.

I am sorry, I don't know anything yet about the diffs between the Pro version and the regular.

[Andrew*]

the Ultra Deluxe camera support (thanks Andrew!) and the A540 PowerShot Canon.

well I never! The same camera as me too!

Glad you're putting it to good use!

Nice shot

Andrew

[barkis]

That's a great piece of work Themos. I shall have a look at the software myself. It does a good job.

Ron.

[themos]

I am busy clearing out gigabytes from my drive so that I can rerun the mosaic at higher resolution. There should be 35Mega pixels to show...

[themos]

Hello again, I finally was able to stitch 6 images together with free Linux tools (hugin, autopano-sift, enblend).

(click to enlarge)

The file I uploaded to ukastronomers.com was 4221x6332, sorry you can't see it in all its glory.

[MikeD]

Lovley colour and feel to this image.

Have you tried "Imerge" for putting mosaics together http://www.geocities.com/jgroveuk/iMerge.html

it's very good and free and did well on my 170 frame moon mosaic.

Mike.

[themos]

Yes, I have Imerge on the XP laptop and I have used it. Perhaps I am no good at using it but it didn't eliminate the seams nicely for me. I only had a handful of frames so perhaps the curvature was too much for Imerge. I expect that having 170 frames means that there's not as much curvature along the overlapping regions.

[MikeD]

I have also done 13 frame mosaics with no problem, but it was a few years ago and I can't remember the settings but I remember you can change the feather margin and feather trim in settings.

Mike.

[themos]

Thanks, I will revisit the issue but must admit to an ideological bias in favour of free (as in speech) tools.