Moon Before Deepsky 02-05-2017

[The-MathMog]

Before it got completely dark (Unfortunately even the astro-darkness of the night is gone) I thought I would try doing a quick shoot of the moon. I did 20 shots but ended up only using 1 of the images as the atmosphere was very turbulent. Even stacking all of the others together didn't produce a better image than this one. Sure it removed the bit of noise that was present, but it just blurred out details. I could have taken a video instead, but I don't have any experience in processing that, so I just went "safe", until I would go shoot some galaxies instead anyway

Iso: 400
Exposure: 1/80th
Nikon D5200
Celestron 130 SLT
Celestron AVX

 

[xtreemchaos]

great single frame mate, what programme did you try staxing with?, I use AS2 or registax 6, there both free to download and quite easy to use. well done. charl ps Pipp is a good program for sorting good frames from the bad also free.

[The-MathMog]

Thank you. For these I tried stacking them manually. Doesn't take long, and I feel that I am in a bit more control of the process. At least until I figure out the programs. I've tried using registax, and I've never gotten good results from that. At least not with the moon. A few frames was always misaligned, and couldn't figure out why. Tried several different options, with more or less align points. Different stacking settings etc. Haven't tried out AS2, but will give it a go. I've also downloaded PIPP, which a lot of people seem to prefer for the alignment of frames, but again haven't had the time to play with it, as I am spending most of my time shooting galaxies lately
But honestly even with Deep Sky Stacker, I don't get very pleasing results either, when shooting deep sky. I've at least gotten a lot better results by manually creating dark-frames, subtracting them from my lights and then aligning my galaxy frames in photoshop. Either DSS might not like my frames, which doesn't have pinpoint stars because of barlow-induced-coma, or it is likely a case of "Error 40" though as we say here (where the error lies 40 cm from the screen), but I've wasted enough time without a breakthrough, that I've just put in on the shelf for now. Until my patience returns

[johnfosteruk]

Nice single frame.