The Moon, 30 Dec 2020
The Moon at a 99% waning phase 30 Dec 2020 between 21:30 and 22:20. Note the bluish and tan colours of the mare (seas).
Technical Details
Imaged from my back garden in Nottingham, UK. The Moon was high up in the constellation of Cancer and seeing was very good - unusual in the UK. TEC140 refractor and ASI174M camera.
The image scale is such that I had to capture two runs with each filter to capture the North and The South parts of The Moon and then stitch the two together in Photoshop using the Merge tool. I used LRGB filters and captured 10000 frames in RGB and 20000 in luminance. Data set was in excess of 500 Gigabytes! I then used Autostakkert, Photoshop and PixInsight to process. Capture software in Sharpcap.
The Moon, 24 Dec 2020 LRGBHa with TEC140
Technical Details
This image of The Moon is a composite picture taken with my TEC140 refractor and an ASI174M high speed mono camera through Baader LRGB and Neodymium filters - the same filters that can be used for Deep Sky imaging (and I have used them for exactly that purpose too).
Moon is in a 73% waxing gibbous phase in the constellation of Taurus.
I captured 2000 frames through the Baader luminance filter and another 2000 through the neodymium filter. I then registered and combined the master image from each of these with Pixelmath with scaling. I used Multi-Scale linear transformation to sharpen the image and a very slight HDR transformation to bring out the fainter detail. This created the master luminance.
Each master R, G and B sub is the best 50% of 5000 frames. I registered the separate RGB channels with the master luminance and then used channel combination to make an RGB image after linear fitting them as individual master subs to attain the same intensity across the three channels. All these steps done with PixInsight.
I then combined the master Luminance with the master RGB to create the picture above in Photoshop with a slight tweak of the vibrance and saturation with Camera Raw filter.
I hope you like it! It is fun and enjoyable creating these lunar images.
Sun 29th May 2020
TEC140 refractor, Baader Herschel Wedge, ASI 174MM camera. Captured with Firecapture, Stacked with AutoStakkert, developed with PixInsight and Photoshop.