Texas Moon

Closely resembles the French Moon posted recently.

This is from May 29. Seeing was not particularly good, so I stacked nine of the best ones in Photoshop and used mean value processing which did a great job of getting rid of most of the noise.

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Thats a real nice shot Bill ! Whats your equip. ??

Celestron wrote in post #8087809
Thats a real nice shot Bill ! Whats your equip. ??

Canon XTi, Canon EF 400 mm f/5.6L lens, and Canon EF 2X II Extender to give 800 mm FL @ f/11. I normally use ISO 100, but in this case, to keep a reasonable shutter speed, I used ISO 200 and 1/60 second shutter speed. My good tripod is out of commission currently, so I had to use a lightweight tripod -- as a result, many of the images were blurred because of vibration. Only about 10% of the images were good enough to use.

My real telescope is still a work in progress -- it is a basket case Criterion Dynamax 8 SC.

Looks like things really are bigger in Texas.

Looks great Bill. I can really appreciate the work in this.

It might be my monitor, but the central dark lava basins are taking on a bit of a plastic look...don't know quite how to describe it.....

I do like it though.

Baz.

A.S.I.G.N. Observatory wrote in post #8090611
Looks great Bill. I can really appreciate the work in this.

It might be my monitor, but the central dark lava basins are taking on a bit of a plastic look...don't know quite how to describe it.....

I do like it though.

Baz.

It might be the result of the mean filtering or maybe rotating and then resizing downwards. I do not believe that I used any other NR, but I will go back to the originals to see what they look like. I do recall that there was thin haze in the sky which was continuously changing so maybe that is what is going on.

EDIT: I also only selectively sharpened the craters and not the lava basins.

Here is a full scale crop of the unrotated image. It does not seem to be much different than the previous version -- just bigger (yes, the moon is bigger in Texas). The Photoshop processing was mean value stacking and then selective USM at 150/1.0/0.

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Yep, it is my monitor. I have just looked on my work PC and it looks much better.

Baz.

I did learn the hard way a few months ago that only the sharpest images should be used in a Photoshop stack because otherwise stacking just any images without culling can ruin the whole thing. Undisciplined stacking might result in less noise, but it will also result in soft images.

Great images Bill. Amazing how much better the moon looks when you start getting the shadows playing with the mountains and craters.

Al

Very nice! Which lens did you use?

princer7 wrote in post #8147752
Very nice! Which lens did you use?

Canon XTi, Canon EF 400 mm f/5.6L lens, and Canon EF 2X II Extender to give 800 mm FL @ f/11. I normally use ISO 100, but in this case, to keep a reasonable shutter speed, I used ISO 200 and 1/60 second shutter speed.

The 400 mm prime is a really fine lens and I am very pleased with its performance. I find that it works quite well with either of Canon's extenders (1.4X or 2X ... or even both together). I purchased it for birding, but have used it for a number of moon shots also. I suspect that you could use your 100-400mm f/5.L zoom along with a TC to get a very good image. The 70-200 mm f/2.8L that you have is also an outstanding lens -- one of Canon's best zoom lenses, but it seems to lose a noticeable amount of sharpness if used with a 2X TC. However, with a 1.4X TC, there is no noticeable loss of sharpness. I don't remember whether the EXIF data is retained when stacking images in Photoshop -- I need to check that out.