[MOON] - one

As the name suggests, this is one of several to come.

Not much to say about the shot, composite of 99 frames, registax and lightroom. The Moon was very low, bright orange, bathing in the sickly smoggy light pollution of Geneva (the one in Europe). My aim was to get some colour on the moon to do a geological map, but impossible to set the white balance straight, as it was *really* orange. The instrument is a 150mm reflector @ f/5 (that makes a 750mm focal length) on an EQ 3-2 (static, as I've ripped the motor's cable out) and shot with a 7D in jpeg - my computer is small and slow, so if I make it stack hundreds of raws, it'll die on me for sure.

The frames were taken between 23h 30 and midnight on june 27th. The Moon was 98.1% illuminated, so its apparent size was about half a degree. That makes it pretty much a full moon, so the terminator shows craters one doesn't see very often. Me at least. Some 400k km away, I saw the Moon as it was 1.3s before.


there you go, critique at will

HOSTED PHOTO
please log in to view hosted photos in full size.

That looks awesome to me. I am completly new to this and hope you can answer a few questions o I can understand this. By 150mm reflector you mean telescope right? You took 99 images and used the program registax to put them together and that along with Lightroom created that lovely image of the moon right?

Very nice. Perhaps could be a touch sharper, but then it sounds like your conditions were pretty tricky, so I think you did very well...the moon does get rather low in the summer months. (I tried some videos the other day with my new Mintron camera, and did several stacks on hundreds of frames sometimes, and it was just so blurry and horrible, with hardly any contrast, I binned all the results.)

Nice shot ! Those size of scopes make for great viewing especially for the moon .

Hi there,

Domat: correct, 150mm reflector means a telescope with a diameter of 150mm and 2 mirrors - one concave (the primary) and another smaller one that throws the image towards the eyepiece/camera. Other optical solutions exist, such as refractors (no mirrors, lenses only), schmidt tubes, maksutovs, etc etc. Each is suited for a particular type of use with obviously the longer focals directed towards planetary photography, and the faster ones for faint deep sky objects.

Registax takes your frames, aligns and then stacks them. This improves the signal to noise ratio and allows for more violent post processing without loss of quality and/or appearance of artefacts.

Adrenal1n: I seem to be doomed to do extreme astrophoto, with severe light pollution, insane turbulence and work the next day. Sharpness wasn t there to begin with, and I think I ve pushed it as far as I could with the wavelets... Even like this there s the nasty white rim around the moon... Will do better in winter, when the moon's nice and high.

Cheers