Petavius and Vallis Palitzsch

[furrysocks2]

This is the result of processing the third set of captures I took this evening - it was the Vallis Palizsch that caught my eye, not that I knew then what it was called.
 

 

The large crater is Petavius, with a rille system in the crater floor (Rimae Petavius) of which the largest fracture can be seen radiating from the central peaks out towards the lower left wall - this was named by Thomas Elger as the "great cleft". The rille branch to the north of the central peaks is perhaps tenuously discernible.

Immediately to the right of Petavius is the Vallis Palitzsch. From https://the-moon.wikispaces.com/Vallis+Palitzsch:

Quote

Vallis Palitzsch is the dumbbell-shaped depression just outside the east rim of 188-km diameter Petavius. On its east is 31-km Palitzsch A, and at its base 41-km Palitzsch. The 17-km pit at the top end, closest to the top margin, is also named: Petavius D.

 

 

I've been taking videos of the moon over a few nights using a PS3 eye camera, capturing 640x480 at 60fps.

With the garage side door open, I began with the 8.5" dob fairly well back into the garage and pointing up over the neighbours car port. As the hour or two past, I moved the scope closer to the door as the moon increased in altitude. I had the top end out the door by the time I took this set.

The dob doesn't track so I took several videos starting with Petavius on the left hand edge of frame and ending when the terminator reached the right hand edge. I was planning to keep imaging until the scope hit the door frame - I was about a 1/4" off it when my wife walked in front of the scope, then pushed past to get into the garage - "oh, sorry... were you recording?" During capture, there were some periods of fantastic seeing where I'd have been happy to settle for a single frame, but I took 29 video yielding around 36000 frames. I used a yellow filter for fun. Teasing the alt-az axes on the dob was not.

 

In PIPP, I set an AOI of 242x353, a grand total of 0.085 megapixels. Autostakkert!2 wasn't happy so I ran them back through PIPP, stretching the white point to 85%. The camera has 6um pixels - not that I know much about image processing at all but figured supposed that if I was undersampling then I should drizzle - I've been drizzling most of my pictures to 1.5 anyway, just to produce larger images - these are tiny crops - so I drizzled this one to 3x. A 2 percent stack - about 520 frames. I compared it with 4pc but preferred 2. I wasn't happy with AS!2's sharpened file so loaded the unsharpened image into Registax and had a fiddle with the wavelets - that's a first. I dropped the image size back to roughly the original AOI crop size.

 

[Stu1976j]

As much as I love DSO's, you just cant at times beat a good image of our neighbouring lump of rock. thanks for sharing  

[furrysocks2]

2 hours ago, Stu1976j said:

... you just cant at times beat a good image of our neighbouring lump of rock.

You'll have to look elsewhere for one of those, I'm afraid...