Cat and Mouse Moon - 28/09/2013

[Luke]

This shot was a bit of an experiment to try and tease out a bigger moon image with my grab and go, non-tracking mount. I used a 2.5x barlow instead of a 1.7x barlow or prime focus with my ED80.

Please click on image for higher-res.

Instead of capturing full frame, I reduced the height by about half to get a fast enough frame rate to grab enough frames as the moon drifted over the webcam sensor. This gave me the moon in six slices, I hope the joins aren't obvious. The technique will be trickier when the moon is more than 50% - I think I will need 6x2 slices for that! That said, it was pretty relaxed grabbing six slices. In the end, though, I downsized the image during processing to sharpen it up a bit, so didn't quite get the big image I wanted.

This session was also memorable for a frantic moment: my cat was darting and jumping around like crazy, when I suddenly realised there was a mouse running around my feet!

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28/09/2013
Celestron Onyx 80mm / Grasshopper 3 (ICX687) / 2.5x Powermate / red filter
 

[SHARKuk]

Really great shot that Luke, I carn't see any joins at all even when viewing the bigger image. Still being an utter newb I don't yet understand what your doing to get that picture but I think it's great. I only hope that once I get around to photography myself I can get results like this. Please keep up the good work .

Daz

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Really nice result. Very sharp, and I see no joins

[baggywrinkle]

Nice and sharp, I like that pic.

[Mr Bergman]

Nice and clean! 

[andyman]

Very clear and crisp moon shot well done

Andy

[AlexB67]

Very nice and sharp. Not often  seen them that sharp, really like it. I had a poke in your gallery, some nice solar images there too.

[Luke]

Many thanks

Daz, I think we're all still learning. I spent 20 minutes the other night trying to find the galaxies M81 and 82, even though I've seen them many times before    I'm determined to learn some star hopping this season! After I popped indoors and checked out Turn Left At Orion's instructions, I found then within a minute.

Alex, very nice of you to say so. I've got a big backlog of solar images that I'm really looking forward to catching up on.