Turbulent Lunar imaging from 17.3

[ONIKKINEN]

Been a while since i got the chance to do some Lunar imaging, 6 months if my logs are to be trusted, oh how (mostly cloudy) time flies. Well, got a chance on Sunday night but seeing was really not good with the Meteoblue seeing index forecasted at 1 and I'm inclined to believe that. Turbulent and breathing recordings, with a sprinkling of 14m/s wind gusts to throw the scope around, but some of the recordings are perhaps not a total waste of time.

All taken with my 8'' newtonian with an APM 2.7x coma correcting barlow and an ASI678MC, all images downsampled to 80% of capture resolution.

First one is the region around Montes Caucasus also featuring Aristoteles and Eudoxus, 20k frames with best 5% stacked:

Second one is what looked like an interesting bunch of craters, i believe these are Maurolycus, Faraday, Stofler and others. 10k frames with best 5% stacked:

Third one is Montes Caucasus again, but with a wider ROI to include parts of Montes Apenninus. Enormous recording, over 30k frames at 70 gigabytes, again best 5% stacked:

Then as the last one we have the South pole, 22k frames and best 5% stacked:

And that's it for this time. In total i captured over 300 gigabytes worth of recordings, but some of them were not worth further processing because they really were too unstable to get any decent detail out of. At least i got to try the new version of Autostakkert, which seems to be significantly faster at parsing through the gigabytes than AS!3.

-Oskari

[WestCoastCannuck]

Images look pretty great given bad seeing!    I would say seeing at least a 2.5.  Colours look great too. 

 

Mike

[Andrew rogers]

What is the complete set-up your using?

Buying soon came here to get involved with the online community.

[ONIKKINEN]

29 minutes ago, Andrew rogers said:

What is the complete set-up your using?

Buying soon came here to get involved with the online community.

My scope is not really any specific brand but a mix and match DIY one, and you cant buy one exactly like it. Closest thing available would probably be a TS ONTC f/4.5 8" newtonian.

Mine has OOUK mirrors with a PV1/10 primary, but these shots are nowhere near the limit of the scope so a worse mirror would produce the same image. The tube is a Klaus Helmerichs carbon fiber tube, focuser is a Baader diamond steeltrack.

The important components here are the APM barlow and the ASI678MC, mount is an AZ-EQ6 but its not so important for Lunar imaging.

[ONIKKINEN]

2 hours ago, WestCoastCannuck said:

Images look pretty great given bad seeing!    I would say seeing at least a 2.5.  Colours look great too. 

 

Mike

Come to think of it i have no idea if i have ever actually been under index 1 seeing, its possible the worst nights i have had were 2 or 2.5. In a relative seeing sense of all my past lucky imaging nights this is in the bottom 20% for sure.

[Kon]

Great images. You have done an excellent job under the conditions as you have resolved the small craterlets very nicely. Nice delicate colours too.

[ONIKKINEN]

1 hour ago, Kon said:

Great images. You have done an excellent job under the conditions as you have resolved the small craterlets very nicely. Nice delicate colours too.

Thanks, i think colour adds a lot to Lunar images. The last one was actually tricky to not overdo, the right side is strangely strong in blue which was easy to "overcook".

[neiil phillips]

Yeah can see the softness re seeing. But enjoyable images nonetheless, and enjoyable being out there no doubt. As you know. The practice never hurts. As I know what your capable of 

Good seeing all you guys still imaging. Inspiring me to also try again one day

Edited March 29 by neiil phillips

[LukeTheNuke]

Very nice! To me, these have a real feeling of depth.