Afew from the 19th

[Astroblagger]

Taken with C9.25” ZWO120mm and baader red filter. 

[wouterdhoye]

Hi,

Although the images look nice from a distance I believe that upon closer inspection your telescope should be able to show more details. The images appear a tad soft/unsharp. Maybe you had plain horrible seeing or the focus was not spot on. Can you also tell a bit more about how you acquired the images, and about your processing?

The top image also shows some strange artifact patterns. Maybe that's due to compression but these artifacts (whatever cause them) wash out all possible detail. I included a blown up screenshot illustrating the issue. The other images do not appear to show this issue.

The good things about your images: good tonality and dynamic range, with only a few burnt highlights. Good overall contrast showing plenty of mare floor albedo differences.

I hope I'm not being too harsh. If possible I'm more than willing to help you get the most out of your equipment.

 

Wouter.

 

[Astroblagger]

Hi Wouter, criticism is good if it makes you better! The seeing wasn’t to great really. I’m pretty sure the scope was collimatied I put in a 10mm eyepiece and everything looked concentric. Should I be using a Barlow to get better collimation? The focus was the best I could achieve by eye adjusting the focused manually. Im a zwo 120mm , I cant explain what the Artifact is and how it’s shown up? I also shot through a red baader filter. I used autostakkert to stack the images. I had virtually no gain when taking the avi’s and just set the exposure accordingly. 
any advice welcome. 

[Rusted]

You didn't mention which capture software you are using.
SharpCap has active screen, zoom adjustment to improve your focusing.
I usually use 200% but other options are equally valid depending on your image scale.

[Astroblagger]

Yes I used sharpcap, I took a 1000 frame AVI, and ran it through Autostakkert, I tried to use min Gain to keep the noise down, but maybe I should have raised it up a bit so I could use a quicker frame rate? I didn't run it through any wavelets though? didn't see the option for this in Autostakkert? I just used unsharpmask in PS3. Any ideas what would cause the artefact that Wouter pointed out?

[Rusted]

Dust?

[wouterdhoye]

Hi,

For lunar imaging there is no need to keep gain very low. I usually use a gain (in firecapture) between 200 and 300. I don't know the values in Sharpcap. But you can use a relatively high gain. At f/20 this results in exposure times around 5-10ms.

Regarding focusing I would recommend to focus on a dark crater rim, and pay attention to small illuminated details in the dark rim. When you see these best you have reached best focus. I would not advise to use the lunar rim.

Regarding the artifacts, I'm a bit puzzled... Maybe you used too high compression when saving the images (jpeg compression can do this) unless these artifacts were already visible in the raw stacked images. I have seen it happen to some of my images in autostakkert.

 

Wouter.

[Astroblagger]

Thanks for the advice Wouter, is there sharpening tools in autostakkert? My corrector plate doesn't look great tbh, maybe I should clean it?

[wouterdhoye]

No, autostakkert does not have sharpening tools. All autostakkert does is create a stacked image prepared for further processing. You can use registax for sharpening. 
Clean optics are good. Though some dirt on the corrector plate will hardly affect the image quality. 
 

wouter