Lunar Disc, 34% Illuminated Waxing Crescent in High Saturation RGB | July 15th 2021

[MalVeauX]

Heya,

Florida has been a hot mess of storms, I've seen very little sky. Tonight I had a small opportunity that I only noticed while doing some yard work near nightfall since that's the only time it was under 100F degree heat and wasn't raining. I still had to content with lots of clouds, but I managed to get a little data in a sucker hole that floated through and seeing ended up being decent enough for this image scale to work out ok. I'm still trying to get color results that are consistent but I find they're more difficult the less illuminated the disc is. Hurricane / Tropical Storm Elsa has left us a swampy mess and we're still getting clouds & rain daily, not to mention roads are still flooded out here from it, a week plus later. Silly Florida...

RGB:

B&W:

My Astrobin link for full resolution and information:

https://astrob.in/5apme6/B/

Equipment:

T.S. 200mm F6 Quartz Newtonian

Baader MPCC Mark III

QHY183C (IMX183) color camera

200 frames stacked from 1800 frames total capture (I had a very brief window and that was it)

In FireCapture, for the color, I try to aim for a histogram in the 70% range to avoid clipping highlights on crater rims, etc. I enabled channel balance sliders to manually adjust R, G & B values so that the histograms were more approximately close (I find this is key to being able to align the color channels later in post and not get super funky results). I raise the exposure and color from the dark image in post, since 200 frames is plenty to get plenty dynamic range and noise reduction on its own, if seeing is good. I was worried it wasn't enough to get any meaningful color other than wonky stuff. I did get some wonky stuff, but was close to the caramel brown & blues that I prefer to try to get. Much easier on fuller discs with more light. I have a soft limb (see screen shot below, the upper right limb) because it was too far to the edge of the sensor and started going past the coma corrected area (I didn't realize I wasn't centered on screen due to scrambling quickly with no time between clouds). So lesson learned there; the coma corrector works wonderfully but only if you stay within its corrected area which is not the full sensor at this focal-ratio and image scale. You can see in my last image the kind of clouds situation it was. I was mainly looking to see how soon I might be able to attempt Venus this season but was skunked on that so setup for lunar and waited for a pocket. After this, it was total cloud cover so I left the mosquito-bath and soup of humidity in Florida heat to its wild self and went inside.

Very best,

Edited July 16, 2021 by MalVeauX

[WestCoastCannuck]

Man that 8 is a monster.  lol  Outstanding results Marty!   So jealous of having an OB.   You would not likely have nabbed this if your setup was not so fast.   The colour looks good.

 

Mike