Done to death i know but..............The moon!

[Daniel]

Here's a quick prime focus image i got of the moon, again, not great seeing the image was swimming all over the place in the eyepiece, but as long as you don't look around the edges too much, it's ok. I actually like the framing in this shot having so much black around it, so I've used it as my desktop background!

[doug]

   That has got the WOW factor !!!  The detail is terrific around the terminator. I only wish that I had the know-how to do that.  Carry on, Daniel, you`re doing a superb job.   

[Daniel]

Thanks man, Im sure it's more to do with the equipment than me actually doing anything, finally got my prime focus working and everything seems a lot easyer to capture, I've also got the advantage of live view on the 40D so I can focus at 10x on the laptop and get as crisp shot as i can. (that said, this was a 10M pixel image and at that res, you see where it falls down)

[JohnP]

Nice image Daniel.. Did you know that if you put your moon image in PhotoShop & the repeatedly increase the saturation in small steps (say 10 or 15 at a time for 15 or so iterations) you end up with a colour moon showing blues & browns... I did it to one of my eclipse photo's a while back - you can see the thread here:

http://forum.orpington-astronomy.org.uk/index.php?topic=2208.0

I gave it a quick try on your image & it works - Looks kinda 'funky'....

John

[Daniel]

Hey, that's really cool, I've seen shots like this before but presumed they were taken with clever combinations of filters, I've pushed it about as far as I could without the detail getting too grainy, is there anything else i could have done to get rid of the grainyness once I'd added the saturation to the image?

Im guessing these are the same brown soil deposits they found on the Apollo 17 mission, if only they'd had photoshop eh? 

[JohnP]

Daniel,

You could apply a Filter/Blur/Gaussian Blur & set radius to something very small like 0.2 or 0.3 - you will loose sharpness though or otherwise you could try one of the free noise reduction prog's like Neat Image http://www.neatimage.com/ - doesn't look too bad as it is though & adds a bit of colour to your desktop

John

[Daniel]

I tried a Gaussian blur, but like you said, I lost a little too much sharpness, I'll try neatimage tonight, I used that on my M42 image and it did quite a nice job!

[doug]

   I think I`ll just have to be satisfied just admiring your images, chaps.  I don`t understand the techspeak for a start, and I can`t "do" the imaging (no gear) and my mini-digi-camera ain`t up to it.  So..... carry on the superb work that everyone is doing. 

[Tom C]

Nice one

Esp after johns tip with the saturation.

[Daniel]

Thanks man, Makes me want to try to capture saturn on a good night and see what i can stretch out of that too!

[Fay]

Great image Daniel. I like John's effects too!!