Copernicus & Eratosthenes (25/10/2020)

[rob_r]

An unexpected short session on Sunday evening with a brief respite in cloud cover. I liked the dramatic scene of the Copernicus crater shrouded by the terminus so I took a few movies of it. The amount of detail was unexpected and quite a pleasing result for me. Seeing conditions appeared to be good with some high thin rolling clouds. The moon was approximately 69% illuminated, a waxing gibbous.

The below image was acquired from 5 movies approximately 100 seconds long, shot at 25FPS with the DLSR's built in digital zoom at about 3x. The scope was the SkyMax 127 SCT and the DSLR is a Canon 600D, movies were shot at around 8.30pm GMT. I was eventually clouded out about an hour later. All movies converted to SER using Siril then stacked the best 33% frames in AS!3, I could according to AS!3 perhaps have pushed the percentage at around 50%. Denoise filter set to 7, sharpened by 50%. The resulting stacks I took into Registax and sharpened up more (perhaps overdone it) with Wavelets. The final stacking process was via Siril. Then a little levels and hue/saturation adjustments plus a final crop via Photoshop.