The Moon 29 December 2014

[Bizibilder]

Another Moon mosaic using my ED120APO, ASI120mm mono camera.  400/2000 frames stacked in AS2, Deconvolution in AstroImage3, 7 pane mosaic made in MS ICE and finished in PS.

Full size click thumbnail:

[Steve Ward]

Another cracker Roger ... 

I was after the same last night but had one look and gave in gracefully , was too cold out to waste time with dreadful seeing here ... 

[JB80]

Nice Roger!

Do you do sharpening before ICE?

I find astraimage doesn't want to play with the image ICE outputs.

[Mak One]

Great image Roger - lovely framing too.

(Jarrod - I try to sort out all the tweaks before using ICE - maybe sometimes just tweak levels for the whole mosaic)

[Bizibilder]

Jarrod - I stack in AS2! and then run the AstraImage L-R deconvolution on each stacked image.  Then open in PS and carefully crop to get rid of any edge artifacts, save again.  Then into either PS or ICE to make the mosaic, PS usually works but for some reason with this stack it kept rejecting the northernmost frame!!  ICE did the job with no problems.  Save the mosaic.  Back to PS for a touch of curves and a tiny bit of sharpening and filling in the missing "black" around the edges.

[Trevor N]

Very good detail and contrast there. Trevor

[JB80]

Great image Roger - lovely framing too.

(Jarrod - I try to sort out all the tweaks before using ICE - maybe sometimes just tweak levels for the whole mosaic)

Jarrod - I stack in AS2! and then run the AstraImage L-R deconvolution on each stacked image.  Then open in PS and carefully crop to get rid of any edge artifacts, save again.  Then into either PS or ICE to make the mosaic, PS usually works but for some reason with this stack it kept rejecting the northernmost frame!!  ICE did the job with no problems.  Save the mosaic.  Back to PS for a touch of curves and a tiny bit of sharpening and filling in the missing "black" around the edges.

I tend to do all that after stitching, basically as soon as AS!2 is finished I try photomerge in PS and that is about 50/50 so if that doesn't work I try ICE. If neither work only then will I try cropping and such. After stitching is when I do my sharpening, either AI3.0 and photshop if it's from photomerge or just PS sharpening if from ICE.

The biggest thing not to forget you see is I'm lazy so the quickest way possible for me, the results seem to be fine so until I see a reason to change things up I keep going I guess.

[Stardust]

Great shots. Sounds like we all get the same result a slightly different way. I've only done the mosiac which I ran through ASI2 then ICE then Astra Image and finished is photoshop, Maybe I'll try AI before ice next time  

[SimonfromSussex]

Super shot, lovely surface detail and contrast.

[Sleepy Kiki]

The full size image is a great, very natural and not over processed.

[PhotoGav]

That's a lovely image.

When processing in AS!2, do you find that the stacking takes ages, like 15 or 20 minutes per pane?

[Bizibilder]

No the stacking takes about 10 seconds.  For a 1280 x 960 frame size I use the following parameters:

Set to "Surface".

Use "Alt and 9" to set the anchor to the largest size - that's the big green box over the image.

Quality estimator to gradient and noise robust = 2

AP size = 60  Min brightness = 20  Multiple AP's - you should get around 400-450 AP's.

HQ refine is checked.

I stack around 400 from 2000 frames.

The whole AS2 process is around 3-4 minutes from start to finish, the stack being one of the shortest parts.  Creating the reference frame takes about 2 mins, all the others are a few seconds each.

Try these parameters and see how you get on - it will depend on the speed of your computer as well.

[PhotoGav]

Mmm, thank you Roger. I've just given those settings a try, but it still takes a long time to do the stacking. My laptop is pretty new and pretty decent, it isn't 'slow' per se. So, I wonder what the issue is. I think this is probably good for a thread of its own... Thank you for your suggestions though.

[Charon]

Excellent work Roger.