Orpington Astronomical Society

Astronomy => Astrophotography => Topic started by: MarkS on Feb 08, 2009, 08:26:29

Title: Moon - Saturday 31 Jan
Post by: MarkS on Feb 08, 2009, 08:26:29
Last Saturday's moon.  This was an experiment doing a mosaic of eyepiece projection images with the Canon EOS 350D on the Celestron C11.  The mosaic is in 12 pieces and each piece was a stack of 7 images - deconvolved.  The seeing was not too good so overall it is not as sharp as I hoped.

(http://homepage.ntlworld.com/the_shelleys/Astronomy/moonmosaic310109third.jpg)

Full size is here (3 times larger):
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/the_shelleys/Astronomy/moonmosaic310109.jpg

Mark
Title: Re: Moon - Saturday 31 Jan
Post by: Mac on Feb 08, 2009, 10:29:22
Very nice. 8)
Title: Re: Moon - Saturday 31 Jan
Post by: RobertM on Feb 08, 2009, 11:09:37
V. nice Mark.  There's quite a bit of effort in doing the mosaic and it's come out very well.
Title: Re: Moon - Saturday 31 Jan
Post by: JohnP on Feb 08, 2009, 12:12:14
Yep - agree with all the comments - sharp, smooth & seamless... I tried my hardest in PShop to detect a seam & couldn't see one anywhere... Out of interest what s/w did you use for stiching the mosaic together...
Title: Re: Moon - Saturday 31 Jan
Post by: MarkS on Feb 08, 2009, 13:19:28

John,

You won't see any sharp seams because it's all blended - but you will see occasional distortions where one blends into another, if you know exactly where to look.

I used Photoshop to do it.  I created a "new" image large enough to accept all the 12 tiles and then added each of the 12 tiles to create a 13 layer image (blend mode: normal) with a mask attached to each layer.  I then used free-transform to move each tile into position - I had quite a bit of overlap between the "tiles" of the mosaic.  This was the time-consuming bit - a small amount of squeezing and stretching was required to get a decent alignment. Then I used a black brush on the various masks to get rid of the sharp edge of each tile.

It only took me a week to do ;)

Mark

Title: Re: Moon - Saturday 31 Jan
Post by: Fay on Feb 08, 2009, 13:29:53
Looks very good to me, Mark
Title: Re: Moon - Saturday 31 Jan
Post by: JohnP on Feb 08, 2009, 14:05:26
Mark - How did you adjust levels between all the different tiles - again did you do it manually?

You should try this software... It's free & although very basic & quite old now works really well....

http://www.geocities.com/jgroveuk/iMerge.html

Cheers,  John
Title: Re: Moon - Saturday 31 Jan
Post by: MarkS on Feb 08, 2009, 15:48:31

John - I didn't do any levels adjustment - I didn't need to.  Thinking about it now, I guess it was remarkable that the image intensity across each tile was so flat.

Mark
Title: Re: Moon - Saturday 31 Jan
Post by: JohnP on Feb 08, 2009, 16:17:44
Yep - I am really suprised - The S/W that I linked to does auto levels adjust between tiles... John
Title: Re: Moon - Saturday 31 Jan
Post by: Tony G on Feb 08, 2009, 18:18:50
Mark.

Great image, I love going to the full size of images like this, and just exploring, especially on images like this with plenty of shadows which seems to show up more detail.

Well done.

Tony G
Title: Re: Moon - Saturday 31 Jan
Post by: Carole on Feb 08, 2009, 23:38:09
Lovely image as usual Mark, the have the patience of a Saint.
Quoteyou will see occasional distortions where one blends into another, if you know exactly where to look.
would this be where occasionally a creater looks oval, or heart shaped?

Carole