May Day Moon Shot

This is my first time shooting the moon with prime focus. My T-mount is also a 2x barlow lens, which with my telescope makes the moon too big to capture in a single exposure. So I took several shots and then did photomerge in PS to stitch them together.

My favorite part is the crater on the terminator, the rim, and a mountain in the center, are high enough to catch light despite the rest being in shadow. C&C always welcomed!

that's awesome!

Fantastic job especially with the Photomerge ! Do you have a link to the original size after photomerge anywhere online ? Bet it looks great !

Thanks guys. I haven't uploaded a full size yet, but I will and will post a link. It's noisy, I stupidly shot at 800 ISO. I also have now noticed an error in the photomerge along the edge of the moon at about 2 o'clock. It's the first time I've ever used photomerge as well, I had to google for the feature

I'm looking through my exposures and I realize now that I have shots I took earlier in the evening that *are* at a lower ISO. I need to go browse them and see if I was smart enough to capture all parts of the moon. I see some at 100 ISO, but I don't think I got all of the moon, others are at 400.

That's high-quality moonage there! Well Done!

Thanks Flying.

Well, I was really unhappy with the disjointed stitching in the original I posted. So I went back and restitched it. Unfortunately I didn't save my Shadows/Highlights adjustments so I had to redo it by eye. Thus this image looks a bit different but the stitch job is better.

Not sure if the tonal quality is an improvement or degredation.

Desaturate it in PS and you'll have all needed tonal quality.

heldGaze wrote in post #14364692
Thanks Flying.

Well, I was really unhappy with the disjointed stitching in the original I posted. So I went back and restitched it. Unfortunately I didn't save my Shadows/Highlights adjustments so I had to redo it by eye. Thus this image looks a bit different but the stitch job is better.

Not sure if the tonal quality is an improvement or degredation.

I think it's just fine . Colors are right on for the moon so don't mess with desaturation . Looks great !

Great photo. I am not sure of everything you did to capture it, but it is amazing. I can't wait until I learn enough to try this.

Thanks for the tips samsen and Celestron, you guys addressed both my questions really. One was does it look okay with more color, and how can I modify it if I want to. It looks like a desaturation of about -15 would make it look like the original.

I also started playing around last night with getting rid of the noisy "glow" off the edge of the moon. I did a magic wand selection and then played with the "refine edge" and finally just bucket painted black. It reduces the noise and the glow is noticeably gone, however I am also changing the terminator then, which I don't like.

BigRedNole, I set up my telescope and pointed it at the moon. I removed the eyepiece and in its place I attached my camera using a special mount that also magnifies the image by a factor of 2. I turned on Live View on my camera and used the LCD image to focus by turning the focusing knobs on the telescope. I set it up to do a 10s timer as the image seemed to stabilize around 5 seconds of not touching it. Since the moon didn't fit in the entire frame, I took several exposures as the moon moved through the FOV, then adjusted my telescope down perpendicular to the motion of the moon and repeated the taking several exposures. I found a set of 7 exposures I was certain contained the entire moon (through experimentation last night I also discovered that I could use a minimum of 3 exposures if I wanted) and then opened them in Photoshop using the Photomerge automation tool. The first time I did it with just "reposition only" but it gave me that jump in the edge of the moon. The second stitching I set it to Auto and it did better. Then I made a small adjustment in levels, some major work in Shadows/Highlights, and sharpening using USM. There was perhaps a final touch up of brightness/contrast, not sure if that applied to this image or not. I flattened the layers and pulled out the bucket paint tool and filled the white areas with black. For the second image I also extended the canvas to the left and filled it with bucket paint so my crop could be a proper square instead of an almost square. Crop, resize, post.

Now I gotta clean up my workspace and post a fullsize The only thing I really want to do is get rid of that noisy glow on the right side of the moon. We had some clouds moving in so not sure if that enhanced the noise there.

heldGaze: Thanks for sharing what you did. i am new to this and thinking of getting a telescope by the end of the year. Want to educate myself so I don't waste money.

Err, wow!

heldGaze wrote in post #14367364
The only thing I really want to do is get rid of that noisy glow on the right side of the moon.

Remember that glow on the right side is normal , when the sun goes down that side is still facing the sunlight and that is the reason you see it like you do so i wouldn't mess with it much cause you'll end up messing it up ! I think it was mentioned earlier about a full moon doesn't have much detail and thats right but it also depends what setting you use when you take the image . for example this image i took of a 99% full moon . It still has some detail without being over bright :

http://home.grandecom.​net …10-23-2010_ronlhodges.jpg

and then here is one that was at 99% that i wanted it to be bright to show natural brightness :

http://home.grandecom.​net …dges/IMG_6134%2​0copy4.jpg

I don't want to hijack your thread is the reason i give links only .

I meant the glow that is not part of the moon, but in the air, not the lack of shadow on the moon's surface. I've now got a full size uploaded and if you zoom in you can see the noise, just a bunch of white dots in the black space off of the moon.

Warning, click here for 19 MB file.

I can do a magic wand selection, play with the edge and do a bucket file which gets rid of a lot of that noise, with changing the actual moon on the right side. But it is changing the moon on the left side, making it's terminator look different.