Moon Mosaic

[Kenny]

My first Moon mosaic!

12 pane mosaic of 97% waning gibbous Moon this evening. 6" Newtonian telescope on HEQ5 Pro mount, lunar tracking. 12 x 40 second AVIs captured with Celestron NexImage Solar System Imaging CCD Camera in SharpCap2. Videos stacked and auto-sharpened in AutoStakkert2, sharpened further with Registax wavelets and blended in i-Merge. Minor adjustment to histogram and curve in Photoshop CS2.

[Mike]

Nice job Kenny though it looks very dark to me.

[Carole]

Wow, coming on in leaps and bounds. 

it looks very dark to me.

I was about to say the same thing. 

Carole

[The Thing]

I like this, the Moon only has an albedo of 0.12 so I think dark is good. Better than any Moon I've done!

[Kenny]

Thanks all.

It is a bit dark but I prefer it like that (in this phase). I deliberately pulled the curve into a slight S to bring out the surface features because it was so 'flat' when it came out post-stacking however this does lose some of the dark limb at the terminator and reduce the overall brightness. I could have added another curve to brighten it back up again but it starts to burn out the brightest craters. Possibly too much time watching the Baker Street guys who process the Moon like this quite a lot.

[MarkS]

The earth has albedo 0.39 or at least that's what it was back when Vangelis recorded his eponymous album.

[The Thing]

The earth has albedo 0.39 or at least that's what it was back when Vangelis recorded his eponymous album.

Got that, knew that. 

[julian]

very nice Kenny

[JohnP]

nice & nice and sharp as well - how many images were stacked in each pane?

[Kenny]

12 x 40 sec videos at 30 fps. After the Analyse step in AS2 I was aiming for ~70% quality. Looking at the quality curve I think I chose 250 or 300 frames to create 12 x overlapping TIFFs (then converted to BMP so I could blend together in i-Merge).

[RachelC]

So jealous! The detail is amazing. A Moon mosaic is on my list...