The Moon

Hey Folks,
It's been a while since I've done one of these as I broke the mount for my good scope (meaning a little 5" Orion Mak) but since I couldn't sleep this evening, I decided to mess around with my little scope a bit.

Now my "little scope" is really a bit of a home brew concoction. For you folks that speak "astro-techno-babble", it's a Bushnell refractor tube (yes, one of those gawd aweful silver dept store Bushnells) but it's got a Simmons front objective and a Meade 1 1/4" focus. The whole thing is mounted on a small, but rather efficient Simmon's EQ mount. Here I used an Owl Optics 40mm eye piece. I have maybe $20 into this whole rig (not including the eye pieces of course) and for what it is, it's actually not a bad little scope.

I would also quickly add that while normally I "stack" my astro shots, these two were not stacked...these were both just single images shot thru the scope.

Sooo...what we have here is a Canon 40D with a Tamron 70-200mm f/2.8 lens (zoomed all the way out to 70mm), hand held looking thru my little scope with a 40mm eye piece. Since I was just messing around, I didn't even have the camera set to RAW or anything...this was just the small, low quality jpg setting on the camera. Both images were sharpened in PS CS3.

This first one I shot on manual, ISO 1250, f/2.8 at 1/60 of a sec. Only minor levels and contrast adjustment on this shot.

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If you were moving around enough to reorient the moon then you really were moving around weren't you.

nice shooting.

Jim,
They look good. I wonder if a B&W conversion would look nice too....the second one has a fair bit of noise in it. The moon is fun to shoot....heck it's fun just to look at it.
Nice work.

George W

I like the first one best. maybe include a shot of your scope rig? sounds intriguing.

Did you try using a little fill flash on these? You might see an improvement.

joedlh wrote in post #6501941
Did you try using a little fill flash on these? You might see an improvement.

I agree but i also find you need a brand new strong set of batteries for flash with the moon

joedlh wrote in post #6501941
Did you try using a little fill flash on these? You might see an improvement.

are you kidding? sorry, i just had to ask...

mi_reefy wrote in post #6502431
are you kidding? sorry, i just had to ask...

The Moon is some 250,000 miles from Earth. What do you think?

wow. i think i'll be giving up on taking pictures of the moon now. love the craters.

Looking at the exposure numbers for ISO, aperture, and shutter speed, I am wondering if you shot these through a filter. Also, when stacking do you use Photoshop with mean value filtering or do you use one of the astronomy programs for image stacking. I have tried RegiStack4, but it seems to be designed for cameras that capture dozens, if not hundreds, of frames and appears to be designed primarily for use with things that shoot video. I found that just using a few frames was not sufficient for FFT processing. Since I don't have a drive that will track the moon, I also found that the images would not align correctly.

Reading your post again, I think that I figured out what you were doing ... holding the camera up to the eyepiece of the telescope.

BTW, I am rebuilding an old Criterion Dynamax 8 that I got for free. I am wondering if it is a boat anchor or worth the effort.

DragonDan wrote in post #6500359
I like the first one best. maybe include a shot of your scope rig? sounds intriguing.

I may try that next time, but I'll wait until I'm at a star party or something so that I have something other than my front porch as background! LOL!!!

joedlh wrote:
Did you try using a little fill flash on these? You might see an improvement.

Ya know I tried...but my sync chord just wouldn't reach the sun...

Hey Bill,
I did actually try to use my moon filter as I usually get better contrast, but on this little scope, it really was just too dark...I wasn't able to keep my shutter speed up with the moon filter on. It is after all, only a 70mm diameter tube with a 600mm objective . Aka...it's not very "fast" at all. Usually when I'm viewing with my 5" Orion Mak, even with only half a moon, I have to have the filter on just to view things because it's so bright, but this little home made concoction sort of gives me a little more leeway.

As far as the stacking goes, you are absolutely right about Registack. I've played with it a little here and there over the years. It's a great program for making a really decent shot from something like AVI footage for example where you may have several hundred/thousand frames. I've seen images where guys have done stuff like that with the SBIG cams that are just truly amazing...but usually they have those fancy GPS tracking mounts to go with the cam. For moon shots though I usually use Astro Stack. It's affordable, very user friendly and it does a really nice job. You loose the color, but you get some really incredible definition from only a few shots and it "auto aligns" the shots for you...you don't have to have them perfectly tracked or anything. Now honestly...I don't know if it would auto align such a severe difference in orientation such as I had with these two shots. I was literally moving from one side of the scope to the other (and everything in between) while I was shooting so things are kind of flip-flopped all over the place. If I were going to stack this set, I'd probably have to correct the orientation first and then stack them, but that's usually easy enough to do and again you don't have to have them perfect.

I would add that I could stack them in PS...I've done it in the past, but Astro Stack is just soooooooooooo much easier. Ya just select which images you want to stack, select a few fairly simple options and hit "Go"...the program really does do the rest.

If I get some time in the next couple of weeks or so, I'll run a few of these thru Astro Stack and see what happens. I had just felt kind of inspired the night I took these and wanted to get some feedback on them even though I didn't really put too much effort into them.

Anyways, thanks to everyone for the comments!

Peace,
Jim