Moon with 80ED & DSLR on Feb 22

[Xiga]

Hi guys

I noticed the moon was up and the weather was clear, so i made like the wind and quickly set up the 80ED in my back yard before the moon passed behind the neighbour's house. As i was in such a hurry, i didn't even bother doing a proper polar alignment, i just put it in the centre of the polar scope in my HEQ5 Pro (note to self, DO NOT do this again!)

Taken from Belfast, UK, on Feb 22, one day prior to being full. No barlow used, so this is at 600mm FL.

This is from 35 Raw stills from my 60D, stacked in Autostakkert, sharpened in Registax6, with some minor final tinkering in Photoshop:

I initially thought i'd pushed the wavelets too far in R6, but i've just had another go at processing it and it came out way worse, so maybe i did ok here. The wavelets are a total mystery though, total trial & error!

As the PA was so bad, i had to keep correcting it's position by using the hand controller. This, in conjunction with the fact i didn't shoot a video, meant i had real difficulty getting it to stack in AS! In the end, i found one particular spot where i could set a single alignment point and bingo, out popped a sharp stacked image with no artefacts. I'll definitely take the time to do a proper PA next time! 

Next time i might try shooting a video instead. Obviously that will produce a lot more frames which will help to freeze the seeing, but then they will only be 8bit as opposed to 14bit, and also they'll be at a much lower resolution than the sensor's full resolution. I would have thought this would be a big deal when shooting something as big and detailed as the moon? I suppose shy of splashing out on a dedicated planetary camera i won't have any other choice! lol.

Clear skies all!

 

 

 

[PeterCPC]

That's a lovely image but you will make it easier on yourself by shooting AVIs to stack. You don't need to do a PA when taking planetary images.

Peter

[Stephen Green]

That is a very nice image

 

Stephen

[xtreemchaos]

hi Ciaran great shot mate, very nice detail. you might want to add a bit of noise reduction on it and you may of pushed the wavelets a little bit too much. i try and get about 150 frames to stack, i also use a 2xed barlow with my ed80 thay work well together with the moon. well done mate.thanks for sharing charl.

[laudropb]

Very nice lunar disk.

[Astro Imp]

I like this a lot, some good detail captured, well done.

[Xiga]

After some advice from Charl, i can see now that the image has a lot of noise, so i've cleaned it up a bit using the Photoshop plugin Topaz DeNoise 5:

I've definitely gone too far with the wavelets, and it's still a bit noisy (due to the low number of frames) but as long as you don't do too much zooming in it's not too bad. 

Charl, i too thought about using my x2 barlow, but no matter how i attached it i couldn't get the whole disc of the moon in frame (it was just too tall, width-wise it was fine). I tried everything, with/without diagonal, with/without various extension tubes, but i couldn't get it to fit. Any idea what i was doing wrong?

 

ps - If anyone else wants a go at processing it, here's the link to the stacked TIFF:

http://1drv.ms/24zDIGw

[xtreemchaos]

hi Ciarán. i use a 45mm 2inex tube ,then attach my 2inch ed 2x barlow then 450d,  and the moon fits nice. this what size it is before i crop.charl.

[Xiga]

Ahhh, of course, my x2 barlow is a 1.25 inch, not a 2 inch, doh! 

That's a lovely image btw mate 

[Pete Presland]

Plenty of detail showing there.

[xtreemchaos]

i download your file, doubled it 4x to give me 8 images ,put the though regi ,ajusted wavelets a bit, rbg alined, sent to photoshop ajusted contrast save as PNG, uploaded. it took about 15 min. clear skys charl.

[Fay]

a really nice Moon Xiga

 

Fay