My first Moon with a telescope

[Adreneline]

I've been imaging DSO and the likes for the last four plus years but last night I pointed by StellaLyra 6" RC equipped with ZWO ASI294MC and a Baader UV/IR cut filter at the Moon having first focussed up on a nearby star using a BM.

This is the result of 100 x 0.01s images stacked in Affinity. I clearly have a lot to learn but I was quite pleased with this first attempt.

The lights were not calibrated in any way. I suppose I should have least used flats but I can't see any signs of dust motes and the vignetting was outside the Moon fov. At only 0.01s exposure I assumed darks were also superfluous or at the very least would offer little benefit.

Affinity made short work of debayering and stacking the lights and the resulting 16 bit tiff was taken into PI to balance colours followed by sharpening and denoising in Topaz DeNoise AI (settings of 1 for denoise and 1 for sharpen - so pretty minimal). The transition region from the Moon surface to 'space" leaves something to be desired so don't go mad pixel peeping  

Thanks for looking and any tips or advice would be much appreciated as I really don't have a clue!

Adrian

 

[CraigT82]

Looks pretty decent to me! 

I think you might be a smidge out of focus. In my opinion, for lunar imaging there is no better way to focus than to zoom right into the terminator area and scutinising the live images whilst tweaking focus back and forth. There is so much high contrast fine detail that it is easy to see when you've really nailed it, especially when seeing is good. Bahtinov masks are just not precise enough for lucky imaging work.

I'd be very careful with the topaz AI stuff as it is easy to introduce fictional detail into the image, but yours above looks fine and is nicely processed. 

[Adreneline]

18 minutes ago, CraigT82 said:

Looks pretty decent to me! 

Thank you. I am literally at ground zero knowing what to do with processing and setting up. I've still got to learn about Live View using my ASI294MC; I was using it with an ASIair which is not ideal. I wondered about using the BM but it seemed better than trying to judge it based on what I could see on the iPad screen of the terminator region. I was also manually focussing as I don't have a motorised unit fitted on the RC as yet.

18 minutes ago, CraigT82 said:

I'd be very careful with the topaz AI stuff as it is easy to introduce fictional detail into the image, but yours above looks fine and is nicely processed. 

I am aware of what Topaz can introduce if used with abandon. I normally use the low light setting and have no sharpening at all, just very minimal noise reduction. On this image I used a sharpen setting of 1 - I couldn't pick anything less.

Thanks for your hlep and advice.

Adrian

Edited March 22, 2021 by Adreneline
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