Low Altitude Moon Imaging

[Mandy D]

The Moon was at 5° 52' when I imaged it shortly after 9 p.m. tonight. The telescope tube looked almost horizontal and the Moon was swimming in the viewfinder of the D800, but I imaged, regardless, then stacked the best 21 images before processing in GIMP. I elected to go monochrome as colour seemed a complete waste of time and I dumped the whole of the blue channel, then applied a touch of sharpenng and followed that by a gaussian blur to get rid of noise. It is still a long way from a great image, but I'm happy with the end result for this altitude.

[maw lod qan]

Even if the viewing isn't as perfect as you would like, it's nice to be able to get the scope low on the horizon. 

With my first observatory I could, but the new one I'm not able to. 

[Mandy D]

37 minutes ago, maw lod qan said:

Even if the viewing isn't as perfect as you would like, it's nice to be able to get the scope low on the horizon. 

With my first observatory I could, but the new one I'm not able to. 

I do have a few scrappy bits of horizon and was very lucky to have the |Moon in one of them, last night. It is strange looking at a Dobsonian mounted |Newt aimed that low. I had to really tighten it's azimuth brakes with the D800 trying to drag the nose down. My patio is a good metre above my garden and surrounding land, so that gives me a small advantage.