Lunar Pics, 12-14th May

[Tommohawk]

Nice to have some clear nights, although not so good for DSOs with that pesky moon. I had to switch over to my summer set up ie the ASI290MM for imaging instead of guiding - I can never remember how to hook it up, no matter how many notes I make! Got there in the end.

I like doing the moon - always look a bit different, and fun to rove around at high mag exploring.

Still playing around with the Quattro as a combined DSO/planetary scope - seems to work quite well although it's seriously overweight on my HEQ5 so I'll need to upgrade the mount if I'm going to keep with this setup.

Usual fun with the kit - couldn't remember the settings and forgot to enable the RAM buffer in firecapture - so only got 6 FPS instead of 130, some dew on the secondary one night. And finally some Win10 fun  - I noticed the images were clipping white, possibly because my screen brightness is so low on the "Astro" power settings causing the gain to be set too high. So I tried increasing brightness with the slider in the power settings only to find its gone. So I reset the power settings to normal, and then ended up underexposed. Hey-ho.

Anyone know how to use the histogram in FC when working near the terminator? It seem to average out, meaning I have to set it to 100%. Can you make the histo work on a "ROI"?

Here we go, happy for criticism etc. The high mag shots are done with a 5X powermate. Used red filter for all - ought to try a proper IR filter sometime I guess, or maybe go mad and do colour. Haven't tidied the edges 

Quattro 10S, ASI290MM with red filter, Firecapture, AS!3, Registax. Same exposure for all, 1 millisecond. 

12th May. Vallis Alpes probably overexposed, only 6 FPS Grrr. , and Montes Appeninus 2 pane mosaic also 6FPS. Focus maybe a bit off.

13th May. Appeninus again 2 pane mosaic, different light, also southern section, and Clavius

14th May.  Clavius and Longomontanus inc Longomantanus D which drew my attention - has a ridge across it? The mosaic was done with MS ICE - theres a slight artifact at the join. The single pane was done with "normal" gain, the mosaic with lower gain, and the brightened not very satisfactorily in PS

 

[wouterdhoye]

lovely images. Contrast and tonality are great. You obviously had pretty decent seeing too.

Great work.

 

Wouter.

[Tommohawk]

3 hours ago, wouterdhoye said:

lovely images. Contrast and tonality are great. You obviously had pretty decent seeing too.

Great work.

 

Wouter.

Thankyou! Yes, seeing was pretty good and also moon was at goodish elevation (36-42 degrees). Also I only use best 3% of frames which I think really helps. 

These were all done with 1 ms exposure, each video about 2.5 mins. For the first shots I used an ROI, but because its not possible to capture at the theoretical limit of 1000fps, this doesn't achieve much. So I did the latter ones at full size -  capture rate of ~132FPS.  I was going to experiment with even shorter exposures to see if this would "freeze" the seeing even better - I had lots of gain spare so this would be easy, and the extra noise would be fixed by having many more frames. The only problem is that I started each evening with about 145GB of disk space free, and after about 5 videos max its all gone! 

 

[PembrokeSteve]

Hi,

Very impressed with your lunar images -  I will have a go with my Televue X5 Powermate, when I do the Moon next !
Regards,

Steve