Second attempt at mosaic

[don4l]

This is my latest moonshot from Tuesday night.  I ended up with a black slot in the middle (Doh!) which I have filled in with a bit of the previous night's effort.  Naughty - I know.

I slowed down the capture in Sharpcap because I read somewhere that this would improve the quality.  I think that it worked, but I cannot be certain.  I'm also wondering if I can do anything to improve the quality of the captured image.  Would a barlow/extender improve things, or is the OTA limiting things?  The scope is a Tal200K (8").  I'm also wondering if binning the capture would degrade the quality.  3.7u pixels would be too small for normal deep sky work.

 

I still have no real method for knowing which bits I have imaged and whether I have missed any bits, so I am gathering far too much data.  Even then, I missed a bit on this attempt.

Any advice very welcome.

I'm off to Argos to buy an external 5T drive now!

Thanks.

[Stargazer33]

That's a very nice image! Pin sharp detail on the full image. I'd say you don't need to do anything more than you are doing now!

[CraigT82]

Yeah I'd say the same, that's a really nice image I'd be proud of that! 

[MarkAR]

Stunning image and beautifully crisp.

 

[geoflewis]

Hi Donal,

That looks very good to me. At full resolution I can't see any obvious mosaic frame misalignments and your processing is just about right, good detail on show without over sharpening.

That camera with 3.7u pixels would probably be optimised shooting at around F18-F21, so including a x1.5-x2.0 Barlow, Powermate or tele-extender would work very well I think, but you'd then have to shoot twice as many frames for a full moon mosaic 😉. It would definitely be worth trying out on individual features or regions like craters Plato, Copernicus, etc.

 

[don4l]

Thanks everybody for the lovely comments - it's very encouraging.

I'm very pleased with the image, but then I see some of the other images that people take with similar equipment.  I have a 1.6 extender which I will try squeeze into the imaging train.  However, the thought of 40-50 frames puts me off.   So,  I'll probably just go for some small areas.

[Rusted]

The full size image is absolutely stunning! Superbly "lit and choreographed" to perfection.