First lunar attempt in AS!3 (& ImPPG!)

[vineyard]

Hello,

Here's my clumsy first attempt.  I could've cropped it to hide my more obvious incompetencies (some bits quite blown out) but that's no way to learn   I took it on an alt-az mount rather than having it tracked.  I suspect I could have taken better quality original lights if I'd kept it tracked and then played with gain (& perhaps even focus) etc a bit better on the way in?

Cheers all,

Vin

(PS - the highlight of the night was BV'ing the moon through my 4" TV...just breathtaking)

Edited March 7, 2020 by vineyard
added PS

[CraigT82]

Very nice effort, well done! Yes tracking helps enormously especially when you want to experiment with gain, exposure, focus etc. I dont think you need the CLS filter though, I'd ditch it next time. Red or IR filters are used a lot with lunar to help counter bad seeing. Orange or even green filters can be used in good/excellent seeing. The idea is to narrow the bandwidth of light captured (the moon is so bright you dont need the whole spectrum) which helps sharpen the image.

[don4l]

That's a nice result.  I've just started to try to learn how to image the Moon and your questions are, more or less, the exact same questions that I was asking a week ago!  I haven't worked out proper answers yet.  Lunar rate tracking helps,  but I would say that exposure and focus are much more important.  At the moment, I start off by looking at a largish bright feature and adjusting the exposure until it is just about to be saturated.  Some of the crater lips are still blown out, but I don't know how to prevent this without losing a lot of the dimmer bits.

Edited March 7, 2020 by don4l

[geoflewis]

That's a good 1st effort, well done. Tracking will certainly help, especially if you want to experiment with settings or produce a large mosaic, but as you've demonstrated the required exposures are so fast that excellent results can be achieved without tracking. Good luck