First Lunar Mosaic (23/24 May)

[AndyUK]

Hi all - I posted this in the wrong area originally (My apologies to those in observing!), but this is my first attempt. Admittedly not the best time of the phase to try it, and the seeing wasn't great on the 23rd, but the skies were cloudless so I had to have a go. These weren't stacked AVI's though - Just simple one-off BMP's (with the seeing so poor I know I really should have stacked, but I had other objects I wanted to try and track down...)

Initially I thought all was going fairly well (with my 100ED, standard 2x Skywatcher barlow and Toucam 840k), but when I stitched them altogether I frustratingly found that I had 4 "holes"... So the following night (fortunately cloudless) I went out again, tracked down the areas and snapped away again, only to find that the moon had "wobbled" so I had to rotate them 12 degrees before then trying to patch them in.

I haven't put this through photoshop yet, but here's the "raw" image (there's roughly 75 frames in here somewhere, and the total bmp image is over 35Mb):

I'm fairly happy with this first attempt at this, although I know that I should have taken AVI's, my focus was a little out, the phase presented quite a large amount of flat areas and also I'm not sure that my standard barlow really does that much justice to the capability of the 100ED - Something else for the shopping list!

[davy999]

Looks good to me!

How many images did you have to stitch together for that shot?

[AndyUK]

Hi Davy - There's around 75 images in there somewhere. I used imerge to stitch them together, which took about 1.5 hrs. It was one way to spend part of a bank holiday...!

[molecub]

Hi Andy - Nice mosaic! I hope you plan to post the final Photoshop'd image as there looks to be a lot of good detail just on the fringe of visibility (particularly in the brighter areas) just waiting to be pulled out by some careful processing.

Bruce

[AndyUK]

I'm always very cautious about overdoing sharpening and of course on websites the resolution is limited - The original .tif file would print to c. 4 foot square, but this version is only about a foot square:

http://stargazerslounge.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=37332&stc=1&d=1275511841

I don't think I'd want to sharpen this anymore... In fact this may already be a bit overcooked(?)

[brianb]

I don't think I'd want to sharpen this anymore...

Sharpening should be applied last, after resizing ... the sharpening you need for a small image is considerably less than for a large one.

[Psychobilly]

Nice first mosaic...

Did you try Microsoft ICE ? It's always the first port of call for me as if it works it saves a lot of time...

Peter...

[AndyUK]

Thanks both - My knowledge of Elements is, too be frank, pretty poor (as is obviously apparent!)...

I must admit I hadn't heard of Microsoft ICE, but I've just downloaded it - I'll try it out next time and see how I get on...

[Space Cowboy]

Very nice quality image!