Lunar Mosaic

[JimothyC]

Decided to have a go at imaging the moon seriously for the first time last night. It was a beautifully clear night but the very nearly full moon meant it was pretty much the only target out there for me.  

I used my Skywatcher 127 Mak and a ASI178MC on an AZ-GTi mount. I did a series of 12 x 2000 frames in sharpcap to capture the whole surface. Then stacked the results in Autostakkert taking the best 20%. I then took the resulting 12 images into photoshop and used the Photomerge tool create a single image. Finally some levels and curves tweaking, sharpening and a big boost to saturation to try and bring out a little colour. 

Feedback and questions are very welcome. 

 

[PhotoGav]

Great result, well done! Isn’t it wonderful when PhotoShop magically makes sense of the jigsaw puzzle and shows you the complete image for the first time?! My only criticism is that the Moon is the wrong way up and the wrong way round! You should rotate and flip to present the image in the correct orientation... unless you really were imaging ‘down under’??!!

[Yawning Angel]

Love it, and seamless! Nice work! I wasn't able to get out last night, so...

Having no data of my own, I've pushed your image through Registax for wavelet sharpening then to Photoshop - "Camera Raw Filter", which allowed me to reduce the yellow CA a little with the green slider (settings below)

There's a little bit of blue tinted diagonal banding running across the image, but I'm not sure the cause. It'd be worth seeing if it's in the stacked frames or if it's a processing artifact

[JimothyC]

Wow that's great work, thanks. I'll post the full res version when I get home from the office.  I'll try and flip it the right way round too, posted this from my phone so I only had a lower res version available. 

It is amazing when Photoshop's photomerge does its thing. I've used it a few times and it's just failed to create anything, but when it works it's fantastic. I'll see if I can post a photo showing where the joins are, they're very irregular. I expect that helps hide the seams. 

[Yawning Angel]

Microsoft ICE does a really good job too, espescially as it's free. Maybe do a comparison?

Microsoft Image Composite Editor

[JimothyC]

Thanks for the feedback. Here's an updated image, hopefully it's a bit better. This time I didn't sharpen in Photoshop, I just used wavelets in Registax. I tried not to go too far with this as I wanted the sharpening somewhat realistic. I also used the camera raw filter as suggested to get rid of some of the CA oh and I flipped the image so it's the right way round. I've resized it down from the original 6200x6200pixels to a more managable 3000, but still left it fairly hi-res. 

Also is a smaller picture showing where Photoshop did the joins, just for interest. And if you fancy having a go with this data, a down sampled tiff of the original data. 

 

moon pano master.tif