30% Crescent Moon

[Kenny]

After the astro members meeting last night, with very clear skies above, I tried a little experiment to see how good an image I could get of the Moon with my DSLR at max magnification (200mm focal length), rather than using a planetary imaging video camera with a telescope (and having to create a mosaic).

Canon 450D. 100 photos at 200mm, f/6.3, 1/400th second, ISO-800

Single exposure (untampered other than cropping) above. AutoStakkert2 output below.




AS2 version cropped, centralised and 15 dark frames applied in PIPP. 75% highest quality images stacked in AutoStakkert2. Wavelets sharpening in Registax 6. Brightened via curve adjustment in Adobe Photoshop CS2.

It's disappointing how quickly that white rim creeps into the edge as you start to apply sharpening (it did that in AS2 auto-sharpening, Registax 6 Wavelets and Photoshop SmartSharpening) though there is a slight edge in the original single exposure too.