Green moon

[Neil Sands]

Hello

I'm very new to this. I have a new Oregon 2000C GUIDE camera and a Celestron 127SLT reflector. For some reason all my photos of the moon so far are coming out rather green. See attachment. I see the same green on the screen of the laptop controlling the camera. Through the telescope the moon looks normal.

Does anyone with any experience of these things have a suggestion about what I should tweak to get a more real colour?

Thanks

Neil

[JamesF]

If you have any colour balance controls on the camera then you might be able to adjust the colour with those.  Otherwise I'd use Photoshop (if you have it) or GIMP (which is free) to adjust the colour balance afterwards.

I'm not familiar with the camera, but I'd guess it's just a bit more sensitive in the yellow/green wavelengths than in blue or red, resulting in the colour cast that you see.

James

[JamesF]

Ah, Omegon 2000C   The penny just dropped.  It's another Touptek rebrand.  I think it may well have blue and red colour balance adjustment in that case.

James

[vlaiv]

Hi and welcome to SGL.

This is quite normal - raw data from camera is not color balanced. Moon is easy target to balance - just make sure it is neutral grey overall. Boost blue and red components until you get good color balance. It can be done in post processing and I would say - that should be preferred way of doing it rather than messing with on camera color balance controls.

 

[JamesF]

6 minutes ago, vlaiv said:

It can be done in post processing and I would say - that should be preferred way of doing it rather than messing with on camera color balance controls.

I think I'd agree with vlaiv here.  But I would check any colour balance controls on the camera before starting a capture run to make sure that they're in a "neutral" position too.  I'd hope that would be the case if the camera has been powered up from cold, but I'd not trust the drivers not to set some strange defaults.

James

[Neil Sands]

Right, thanks everyone - very helpful.

The only thing I can see in the camera's settings that hints at colour is the "Data and Color-space" dropdown, which by default is set at 8-bit RGB / RGB24. The other options are 8-bit RAW / RGB24, and then the same again but 12-bit.

I've come inside now and can't try it out for real but if I point the camera around the room, using the RGB settings, the image I see is basically a yellow rectangle. Using RAW instead and the rectangle turns white. So I think next time I go out I'll use RAW and see what happens. I'm shooting in the dark because I don't understand these things really, but we'll see I guess.