Moon mosaic 15th February 2008

[Starflyer]

I decided (in hindsight rather foolishly ) to have a bash at putting together a moon mosaic using my Dob mounted 10" f/6.3 Newt.

I grabbed 116 x 10 second captures, each 100 frame avi was stacked in Registrax with the best 20 to 40 frames making up each image. I then sorted through the resulting images and removed any duplicates, this left me with 85 images each with plenty of overlap with which to build the final mosaic.

I then stumbled across a (glaringly obvious) problem. I'd actually started to put the mosaic together and after aligning 8 or so images in iMerge it suddenly came to me that I hadn't even considered field rotation and that things weren't lining up - doh

I googled for a while and found Harry Kambanis's excellent 'Field Rotation Calculator for Alt-Az telescopes' spreadsheet; http://users.altecnet.gr/harryk/. From this I worked out that I had 0.00601884083569 degrees of field rotation per second. Using the time stamps of the avi files I then calculated the rotation required for every image.

After rotating, cropping and merging about 60 of the images rotation started to become apparent again The calculated rotation must have been slightly out, I then struggled for a few more days trying to figure out why it was wrong - in the end I gave up and adapted my method.

I took the original images from the top half of the moon and calculated the rotation required using the time stamp of the middle file, rotated left or right as required, cropped and merged these. I repeated this for the centre of the moon and for the bottom half and ended up with 3 large images. I cropped these and rotated them by tiny amounts until they lined up perfectly in iMerge.

Here's the final result;

small version

(click to enlarge)

There's a full size jpg version here; http://www.nebulosity.co.uk/images/lunar/final_mosaic_c.jpg ~ 2MB

There's also a full size bmp version in the same directory but it's around 22MB

Ian

[SteelRat]

That's very nice Ian 8) Well put together - great work from the Dob too.

Cheers

Matthew(SR)

[Ferox]

Very nice image Ian.

[Grant]

Gorgeous image! Lovely and crisp

Great job!

[legion48]

Blimey Ian, that's a nice result. Sounds like you had to put a lot more effort into this one and it's a cracker.

[Andrew*]

Very nice and crisp - they really don't get a lot better! Gotta give a mosaic a go next time a high bright moon is up...

Andrew

[Talitha]

Beautifully done, Ian! :thumbup:

[beamish]

I'm with Carol on this one Ian . Love it.

[Starflyer]

Thanks for the positive comments

Cheers,

Ian

[jgs001]

Superb Ian, nicely done

[themos]

Very impressive and a lot of work.

[algol]

it is a cracker that mate.

[zhgutas]

superb! lovely sharp detail all over

marius

[Albireo380]

Excellent Image ian, and a huge amount of thought and work gone into it to get the mosaic.

Tom

[mightymonoped]

Hats Off for a great image and a colossal amount of dedication to get it :notworthy:

Tony

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

Well worth the effort, its excellent.

Kaptain Klevtsov

[barkis]

An excellent piece of work Ian, including the rotational corrections you applied. A stirling job indeed.

I just had a look at the larger version, and slowly scrolled north to southm, and pretended I was in an orbiter. It worked pretty well with a little imagination.

A real great job mate.

Ron.

[Brinders]

Looks damn good to me. Excellent!

[Starflyer]

Thanks again, I'm over the moon () with the responses

Ian

[DanDare]

Really nice image Ian, well worth the effort.

Roy

[Starflyer]

Thanks Roy

Ian

[psychobabbler]

Well done Ian

Tremendous picture and a lot of work.

David

[Starflyer]

Thanks David,

How's your imaging coming along?

Hope to see you at Kielder,

Ian

[Andrew*]

Very nice and crisp - they really don't get a lot better! Gotta give a mosaic a go next time a high bright moon is up...

Working on it now... have to look at this again to see what I'm working towards. This is a fantastic mosaic.

So far I've only got the terminator, and that's already 40 panes... :shock: gonna be a long night...

Andrew

[Starflyer]

Very nice and crisp - they really don't get a lot better! Gotta give a mosaic a go next time a high bright moon is up...

Working on it now... have to look at this again to see what I'm working towards. This is a fantastic mosaic.

So far I've only got the terminator, and that's already 40 panes... :shock: gonna be a long night...

Andrew

I can't wait to see the result Andrew

How many images did you end up with?

We'll have to have a chat about monster mosaics at Kielder.

Cheers,

Ian