Earthshine mosaic 9/1/2011

[teh_orph]

Hi guys,

for kicks last night I tried making a mosaic of just the Earthshine of the new moon. I have a mosaic coming of the bright part too but I've not finished it yet. This was really just a test to see if I can image the moon when it's only lit by the Earth

This was shot with a Philips SPC 900NC, no barlow at 5 fps with the gain and exposure cranked pretty high! Despite having a fixed exposure and white balance each image came out with a very variable brightness simply because stray light from the light side would sneak in. I've also caught HIP 114603 in the shot too. Five videos, stacked in Registax, merged in iMerge but lots of processing in CS5 to sort out the brightness levels.

Anyway just a test - this will form the dark side of the light side mosaic I'm still working on.

Cheers for looking,

Simon

[oldfruit]

That has come out rather well, and you can still make out some detail on the earthshine part of the moon. Good capture.

[Midpoint]

That's a great picture. For a bargain web cam, SPC900 performs really well and I love see shots from it

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Nice one. If you can combine different exposure times, it should be possible to do some dynamic-range compression and get both earth-shine and the illuminated section of the moon. Not trivial to do, however.

Cheers

Michael

[astropete]

interesting shot, can any one say what the image is at the moons limb, a star, or planet? thanks for sharing.

[teh_orph]

Pete, apparently that's HIP 114603. I was hoping for something more juicy eg a planet or even some kind of transit but the moon didn't move fast enough for that!

Michael, I'm gonna actually try that! But as you say, I bet it'll be tough to do - stay tuned