Various Moon Craters 6-4-2017

[Carole]

Managed to drag myself outside last night, got a few hours respite from my Bursitis pain.  Though must be a masochist as every year I say I am never doing planetary again, and here I am 1 year later giving it another bash. 

The plan was to image Jupiter, but I started by getting focus on the Moon, and managed to get some areas I have not imaged before.  Still stacking other areas, so will post up when done.

DBK21 + 3 x barlow
ED120
25% of 353 frames so Autostakkert tells me but as it stacked the results of 3 AVIs separately I don't know if 353 is just one stack or the sum of all of them.  Anyway, I stacked the stacks together.

[doug]

     Well done for returning to the planetary fold ... your images were always very good. Let`s have some more of them, please.

     Doug.

[Carole]

Thanks Doug,

This is the Apennines Region.  I think this area probably needs imaging at a slightly different time to get better shadows.

Same kit as above, Autostakkert says 312 frames this time and I asked it to stack 25%.  Still not sure how to read this, is the 25% the 312 frames or the frames I had to start with.  Is the results of the last of the 3 frames.  think I will stack the final Moon image separately and see what it gives me.

Duncan?

[Carole]

Plato Region. 

I stacked these 3 AVIs separately and each one had over 300 frames to them, and as I captured them all with the same length AVIs I presume they are all roughly 25% of 1000 frames.

[Hugh]

Well done Carole ~ whilst our closest celestial body I always think it the hardest to photograph properly.

Hugh

[Carole]

Thank you Hugh.

Carole

[The Thing]

Hi Carole, nice images.

You should be capturing a couple of thousand frames each AVI, not hundreds. I generally capture 3000 frames at as fast a frame rate as possible even if the image looks underexposed when capturing, stacking sorts it out generally. Don't worry about blurring due to Moon movement over a two or three minute capture if your frame rate is low, AS2! does a lot to derotate the data as it works. Then I use 30-40% of the frames for each stack. Use large APs in Autostakkert as well, it is tempting to think smaller ones will yield more detail but it's not the case most of the time. For my Jupiters I use 10x 100 size APs and would use 200 for the Moon.

HTH

Duncan

[Kenny]

Wow. Very nice Carole.

[Carole]

Thanks Kenny