Crater Gassendi and a big moon

[lukebl]

To add to the flood of big moon images, here are a couple of my efforts from Valentine's Day.

Crater Gassendi. Mosaic of 12 frames, c 1400 frames each, Televue 5x Powermate, SW250mm f/4.8, SPC900 webcam.

Full frame moon. canon 450d at prime focus.

[brianb]

Gassendi's a cracker, well done & thanks for posting!

[MrsR]

Beautiful

[jgs001]

Stunning Luke, gassendi is amazing

[neil phillips]

Got some nice rilles in Gassendi there. Lokks like its colour ? maybe try to greyscale might improve the appearance not sure ?

Same for the mosaic, unless colour is spot on greyscale often looks better i think, experiment see what you think Luke

[lukebl]

Thanks for the comments. As for the colour, I know that people generally process in B/W, but to my eyes the moon isn't grey and it just doesn't look right in grayscale. To me, it's various shades of olivey-brown, which I think the webcam shows up well. Each to his own!

[Jupiterholic]

Fantastic shots! Loving both of these, especially Gassendi!

Great job!

[neil phillips]

Well that is true, which is why i said colour has to be spot on for what your saying to work on any particular image, on my monitor here the large mosaic looks pinky purply. and the moon isnt pink or purple just as much as it isnt grey.Colour thats not correct looks worse than grey in my opinion but as you say each to there own

[Space Cowboy]

Colour looks fine to me. Fantastic crater shot Luke! Certainly a great advert for the powermate, I've been considering splashing the cash on one for my auto Dob.

[luis]

2 beautiful pictures !!!, but Gassendi is suberb.

Thanks,

[satnavsatnav]

The detail is fantastic cool man

[neil phillips]

The extra pink is quite easy to tell Stuart if you take the image onto reg 5 the rgb colour balance Grapth shows why, the red is highest, pulled back a bit you get the colour, but without the white areas having a pinkish hue. Reg rgb colour balance does a auto guess, i tried it, but often reg will get it wrong. in those cases its often better to look at the grapth and adjust manually, reg sometimes raises a colour for example, when sometimes its better to drop the other two colours. my manual tweak looked better than reg auto adjust, never the less the grapth can tell you loads, sometimes what colour is causing a tint, in this case its the red, as soon as i dropped the red, the tint went, it works for the moon, jupiter, saturn you name it. So worth checking with this no matter what your shooting.

Im always getting colour Wrong, its something i struggled with for years ( still do ) but in time i think if you love imaging enough to want to learn, and perfect all your hard work. well what better place to start. of course im assuming people want to get better results, hence the disscussion of a Barlow or camera recently. well that costs money. all this costs is sharing information with those i think might be interested.

if not. ill get the jist. and concentrate on my own images. But im always listening to others views, as we are never to big to think we have it all sussed. I certainly havent. how many on here have ? If no ones interested in the finer things then why buy a barlow.Let me guess to improve. Well luke said he took colour seriously enough not want to do BW, so i thought i would suggest the colour looked slightly off to me not by a lot mind ) ? Its ok if some one dissagrees no problem, i often dissagree, Me and Brian have dissagreed on a couple of things here and there, but you will notice, when i think hes right, ill say thanks and ive learned something i didnt know perhaps ? like on my moon mosaic recently. Maybe i just think all the hard work is worth the fine things, if others dont agree, then its all cool, i Know colour is subjective, but there is a tint for sure, i know because i just removed it and saw it on reg 5 grapth. so colour actually looking fine to one person may not look fine to another i guess ? but anyway theres the tip. reg 5 rgb colour balance grapth, its great for the spc 900.

[Astrokev]

Colours look great to me. Stunning shots Luke. Very impressed, and a tad envious.

Kevin

[neil phillips]

Ok looks like i might be the only one then lol. anyway heres a comparison, it was a manual tweak i didnt spend more than a minute, im sure it could be tweaked better, infact looking at this it looks like the red on my tweak still looks a wee bit heavy. but now NEARLY NEUTRAL lol. if others dont agree hey its fine. but thought i would share why i was trying to help. with someone who loved colour a lot. the tweak is on the right, as mentioned just a quick one, it wasnt perfected, but you can see the red tint in the white highlights are now gone.

[The Bat]

Cool pictures. I was looking at Gassendi last night. Fabulous looking crater.

Rachel

[lukebl]

Thanks all, and many thanks, Neil, for your input. I really appreciate your advice, and your tweaks to the whole moon image are a big improvement. I certainly didn't want to start any argy-bargy about this!

Actually, my comments about colour were mainly directed at the Gassendi image. I know the whole moon image isn't right. This is probably because I hadn't bothered to take the LP filter off my coma corrector, so the images had a pink cast. I had a very hasty play with the colour balance in Photoshop, but clearly didn't get it quite right. Anyway, I feel I've learnt something!

[Space Cowboy]

Yeah I see the pink tint on the smaller scale image. Neil has eyes like a hawk! Time I went to specsavers

[Porl]

holy smokes you got a close up on that crater!!! thats amazing!!

I love that full moon shot, and how you got detail all across it where-as I tend to only get the mountain ranges along the terminator in focus normally. Is it a single frame photo?

[lukebl]

Thanks Porl. It's not a single image, but 16 frames stacked in Registax, although each frame covered the whole moon (i.e. it wasn't a mosaic). In future I'll try a lot more in the stack.

Here's a highly-zoomed extract showing a single frame compared with the stack. It shows how the subtle contours in the mare come out nicely after stacking.

[neil phillips]

My trouble guys is i see all the hard work we all put into this hobby, and i often assume ( sometimes maybe wrongly, sometimes maybe correctly ?) that we all want to achieve better things for ourselves, so when i see something thats easily corrected, i cant help but try to mention it, In the past ive been ignored for that reason, as often it can come across as big headed or mr know it all, but thats not the case at all. as i actually know so little, im still trying to learn as much as i can from others too. But i have taught myself a few tricks, and when i notice things that could be corrected or enhanced, i find it hard to stay silent, because i know those astronomers will grow, if they had a little encouragement with the problems, but how do you say to someone there is a problem, without coming across as arrogant, no matter how one trys sometimes people can get defensive, ( and sometimes from folk that didnt even take the image ) as they are seeing it as a attack on the persons hard work. Which it defiantly is not. Ive helped people in the past and took immense pleasure in seeing them grow, and seeing there images improve. and that to me is friendly thing to do, a enviroment were people are afraid to discuss problems with the captured images, ( yes including mine ) is not a learning eviroment, but a tactfull pat on the back type in enviroment,

I often do that too myself. But sometimes i want to just say hey try this, or try that, and you will cure this problem or cure that problem, as i keep beliveing, they want to go foward, the way i did ( do ) when i first started. which often is the case, but not always, some will always take it as a personal attack. and im afraid for those types, well its just not worth bothering, I just wish we could all speak our minds a lot more without fear of over stepping the mark, or being seen as arrogant. Being on these forums for me, half the fun is watching you guys grow, i get frustrated when i see the same mistakes happening week after week that are curable, because people are afraid to help. I have done a couple of tutorials on here. But that is not the same as interacting with you guys on particular images aquired, I get a lot of fun doing that, often ill just get to a point were ill start to stay away. Because blind defensivness doesnt help anyone progress, infact it makes it worse. because those that might benefit, go away thinking all is pukka, and that guy has a attiitude problem. Its then i just want to not bother, and go back in to my own world, not wanting to be apart of every body elses. I love astronomy,and love watching everybodys images begginer advanced alike. But the other things ive mentioned frustrate me. I dont know why i like seeing people progress ? i just do. Any way thanks Luke for saying that, if your not sure about colour reg 5 colour balance will often show you the 3 colours in line.

when i did that on your big mosaic i could see the red in front green in the middle, and blue too low, i told reg to do a auto adjust, but it aligned them, yet the image sucked. for variouse reasons it can do that, on those occassions its better to look at the grapth then just adjust by eye, bearing in mind what the grapth told you, so i took your image to image analyzer ( i like doing it there ? ) dropped the high red a tiny bit, raised the low blue a tiny bit, then hey more neutral whites, reg auto version, put too much blue in. Hence the manual suggestion, with the grapth info. Stuart glad you responded, You would be surprised how much i miss on my own images. often i wake up in the morning and thing DAMM WHAT I WAS I THINKING. we are all human, and all miss things from time to time. But i still reckon your camera is letting you down much much more than the barlow is, look at it this way, if you want a faster car get a better engine, your talking about changing the tyres, when the ones you already have are tracking reasonably fine already. dont be surprised if the car doesnt go any faster Stuart. Ive learned a few things over the years, A dbk in the right hands can kill a spc 900 stone dead. both in detail and easy colour control. and those are you biggest problems right now. Those will not change one bit with a TV barlow. if your not sure try it. but i know the camera, when you have it sussed under good seeing will leave you speechless. Thanks again Luke your images are looking very promising. Hey if you like colour, a secondhand DMK with rgb filters would really kick butt. But i realize money is tight. its the same here for me, i cant even afford to get my primary redone and it needs it ahh well.

[dlp]

Lovely images as usual Luke. You've set the yardstick against which I'll be judging my future lunar images.

As to colour, I wonder how many people using this site have professionally calibrated monitors? If you want to spend even more on the hobby try here.

David

[Space Cowboy]

This forum will be a lot poorer the day Neil stops giving honest opinions. Your passion for imaging is very infectious Neil! I for one always look forward to reading your comments whether they be positive or negative sharing knowledge is the key.

Love your car tyres/powermate analogy! I will try and stop obsessing about the 5x tv. Will probably get both the tv & dbk....heck life's too short I could be run over by a bus tomorrow!

[metz]

superb if there was a housing estate on the moon you would see it fabulous

[neil phillips]

I thought about that DLP, in relation to my own monitor, which is one reason i checked rgb balance on reg 5, But when the colour grapth basically coincided with my visual perception, and i was able to correct for it, producing a more neutral tint on my monitor, i discounted any obviouse bias my monitor may have been producing, as reg 5 colour balance on most occassions ( not all mind ) doesnt generally lie. Infact i belive that would be likely for most modern monitors in use today, unless one is really using a monitor thats a bit of a dinosaur, if a visual perception matches with a colour grapth ( reg5 ) then its unlikely to be a uncalibtated monitor, thats too much of a coincedence i think ?

Thats not to say we all wont have differences, but the question is i suppose, is that difference bad enough to throw of judgment, especially if a colour grapth is coincident with a visual veiw on any monitor, i suspect a little, but nothing where a tint isnt real.

Although its something you got me thinking about as reg 5 auto balance produced too much blue, so i guess in my case, the red would likely be close, but maybe i should check my blue, the point is though if you guys see a colour tint on a astronomical image, and upon checking with a colour grapth, such said tint shows up high on the grapth consistently, its likely to be real.

Ive found in most cases ( though i admit probably not all ) it does coincide well. Monitors from the ark, if one is seriouse about imaging, ideally should be changed, but i realize ( as in my case ) funds are tight for a lot of us.

I actually think brightness and contrast in my experiance, is the real calibration thats most off. or lets say very variable between each monitor views, i know for example mine is over bright, it cannot be adjusted, ive tried, its just a flawed design.

Though as far as seeing flaws in images are concerned, its great, as it shows up everything ( which i like ) what i dont like, is my tendency to process too dark, or for others images to appear too bright to me on my screen. I wonder if others have this problem ? i suspect its more troublesome than the colour one i feel. I may be wrong ? but ill bet we have two camps here, the slightly bright, and the slightly dark camp. im the former. its a interesting discussion, and one very often overlooked and ignored.

Liked your bus analogy Stuart, those tyres def needed changing then. if and when you get a dbk, bend my ear, ive figured a lot out about it.

Luke i reckon DSLRs really come into there own on widefeld moon shots, what you got for one snap, would take me 29 seperate panes and 20 hours processing and the quality is similar, just much less work for those with DSLRs

High power shots is where the webcam comes in isnt it, capturing those good seeing moments. not sure how many frames your capturing with the spc, but its worth getting at least 2000, and stacking at least 50 to say 400 depending on the seeing you get.

[lukebl]

Valuable comments, Neil. You've inspired me to work harder with the moon images, and really concentrate on getting a lot of data on a smaller area, rather than going for a rather quick-and-dirty wider area. I suspect that I would have got much more detail out of the Gassendi image if I had taken this approach, and would have avoided some of the frames being rather noisy and with banding artifacts.

I also need to move to something better than a webcam, but times is hard!