Moon Shots

[Bernoulli]

Here's the moon from last night. This is my first ever attempt to attach a picture in this forum so here goes . . .

[timeasterday]

Great job! What did you use for that shot?

[Bernoulli]

Thanks for the compliment, timeasterday. Since my beloved Longhorns were getting stomped last night, I decided to pass the time with some lunar photography.

I used a 40d at prime focus in a 127 mm Maksutov-Cassegrain. It has a focal length of 1540 mm which, I suppose, you multiply by 1.6 to get almost 2500 mm on a FF basis. It fills the frame almost perfectly so it's all the scope you need. 1/20 sec at ISO 400, RAW. Since we're getting low on the horizon - this was just at the start of full darkness - resolution suffers a little but not enough to matter.

Then it's off to Aperture for some post processing. A little sharpening and a lot of saturation. I think injecting a little color for the moon always helps. The moon has subtle colors and mucho saturation helps bring them out. I upped the temperature just a bit to get some ruddy tones in there. Set the levels so that the background sky is completely black. Use the highlights slider to bring out detail along the limb (the edge on the right).

Here's a 4 second exposure at ISO 1600 to bring out the darkside, but I need a tracking mount to make this work better.

[Adrena1in]

Nice moon shots Bernoulli, I actually like the way the moon has moved in the 4-second image. (Amazing how quickly things move at such long focal lengths eh?!) You should've started your own thread for those shots though, to get more people to see them. :)

[Pete]

MOD: Threadjacked discussion moved to a new thread.

[Bernoulli]

First off, I certainly apologize to both timeasterday and the moderators if I hijacked the thread. I thought I was posting in context and it certainly wasn't my intention to do that. Second, OMG I have my own thread!

I started doing moon shots back in the 90's starting with TechPan, and every few years I round up whatever equipment I have, see if I can get it to look through a telescope, and go at it again.

I'm big on post processing for lunar shots, particularly color oversaturation and stretching. The moon has very muted colors but they are there and they carry some information about our neighbor. If you look at the shot of the Moon's NE quarter in the attached image, you can clearly see two colors of lava in the three seas that are visible: Serenity, Tranquility, and Crises (left-to-right). Afer the blue lava flooded the entire area and solidified, a second lighter-toned flow with different composition (more titanium, I think) covered most of the Sea of Serenity, leaving the clearly visible edge.

But enough geochemistry. Taking pictures of the landscape above is great fun and I've enjoyed all the moon threads on POTN.