The Moon - 14 Dec

[brianb]

Here's my 11 frame mosaic from Dec 14:

1652 - 1712 UT. WO FLT 110, 2x Powermate, W29 (deep red) filter, DMK41. This is a 25% resize; full size version here (select "High res image" from the zoom menu).

Diameter 30.01'; altitude 35.2 deg. Colongitude 14.2 deg, illumination 60.7%, libration in latitude -06 deg 05 min, libration in longitude -01 deg 51 min.

Transparency moderate to poor with occasional drifting cloud. Seeing good with continuous but low amplitude & slow boiling. Temperature +05C, wind NE force 2-3, baro 1041 mb, rising slowly.

[barkis]

Another Pearler Brian. Seems as near perfect as you could get to my eyes.

Ron.

[brianb]

Seems as near perfect as you could get

Hmmm. There's a bit more noise than I'd like along the terminator, a particularly bad patch in the middle of Mare Imbrium for some reason. (Maybe I'll have a go at patching that small area in!) But otherwise the weather and seeing more or less cooperated and I don't think it would be possible to do much better without going to a longer focal length & larger aperture. The amazing thing here is just how little sharpening I had to do - focus nailed & very little seeing smear to cope with.

I really like the way that the three-quarters-complete ring of Clavius contains the rims of two of the "craterlets" within it but none of the floor is illuminated. I didn't notice this at thge time; pity, it was worth a close up.

[PeterW]

Nice one. Here's my take through the only 30second cloud slot I got all evening, thru my WO66mm with DMK41. Took mine a wee bit later, judging by clavius. How do you balance the disk and terminator brightness as I seem to lose the crispness of the terminator.

Cheers

PEter

[barkis]

Hope you don't mind me dabbling with your Image Peter. I'm no expert processor, but I thought I would like to have a go at it for you.

Might even have made it worse .

Ron.

[brianb]

How do you balance the disk and terminator brightness

With difficulty!

Last night I was shooting with the gamma on the camera set to 150%. The only "level" adjustment I did was to use the shadows & higlights tool in PS Elements, 20% "lighten shadows" & 20% "darken highlights", on the individual frames before constructing the mosaic. Whatever you do it's important to keep the settings the same for all the frames.

My method wouldn't work with a 30 sec hole in the cloud ... it took ~5 mins set up & adjustment plus 20 mins to shoot the 11 AVIs (a few delays & starts caused by clouds drifting around - 15 mins would have been enough in the absence of the fluffy stuff).

[PeterW]

Ah... I try to minimise the exposure, keeping the gain to minimum. My aim is to fill the image histogram so I do not waste grey levels or clip out the high lights. I did (very briefly try to tweak the gamma), but it didn't seem to do much, looks like I need to have another go. Only other processing after avistack was a little bit of wavelets to crispen the image, without making it look artificial. A slight level or curve tweak seems to help the terminator, while bleaching the rest of the disk slightly.

Cheers

PEter

[brianb]

My aim is to fill the image histogram so I do not waste grey levels or clip out the high lights.

My technique is to aim to leave about 20% at the top of the histogram ... sharpening increases contrast and without that headroom you may well end up with clipping in the final image.

[Dave Smith]

Very nice image Brian. I also had a go at that.

Dave

[oldfruit]

Cracking image.