I grabbed some images of M4 and Antares tonight, to make a mosaic with yesterday’s close conjunction (low in the west with horrid light pollution and gradients). At the same time, I dug up an old LPI mosaic of the full moon and mixed them all up in Corel PhotoPaint.
It’s a little rough and ready, but I might play some more tomorrow to see if I can improve on this somewhat artistic interpretation.
Thanks guys – I tried to bring the earthshine out from a grossly over exposed Moon image, but it looked Yuk! So, I washed out a full Moon mosaic and combined it with the crescent Moon of the 28th with a much more pleasing (although unnatural!) look.
I spent way more time processing this image set that I did capturing the images. The original 3400x2800 composite looks even better that the jpg resized for the web.
Beautiful. You just need to tweak out the dark reddish background over the left half of the image and then send it off to the mags! It will depend on your monitor settings, but on mine the vertical border between the left red half and the black half to the right of the Moon is very obvious, as is the red circle around the Moon. I did a quick level adjustment in the Gimp to get rid of it, hope you don't mind.
Thanks for the image analysis, explanation and tweaking. On my monitor, they still look the same; it's a BenQ 20" LCD. I received similar feedback from a post on CN so it looks like my monitor is not suited to the finer nuances of image processing?
I'll have a play around with the larger version to see if I can implement your suggestions.
Thanks!
Dennis
EDIT: Just copied and pasted the images from my original post and your re-work into my image processing application (Corel PhotoPaint) and did a stretch and it clearly showed the difference as you stated. Oh well, let’s read the manual...
God I love this image...I know I have already said it Dennis but it just fascinates me.
Its hard keep everyone happy with different monitors....I have seen 2 monitors calibrated together sitting beside each other and you can still see differences in images.
I find it fascinating too, almost hypnotic. I think it's because the overall image portrays what the scene might look like through the eyepiece, where the eye can accommodate a much larger range of brightness than an image on a monitor.
I have had some quite interesting and varied responses from posting this composite image on other forums, so for completeness I thought I would describe the assembly process – here are the details:.
The background (29th Sept) is made up of 2 Pentax *ist DS images – an Antares wide field and an M4 wide field. These 2 wide regions were aligned on common stars in both images using Corel PhotoPaint (I can't afford Photoshop!).
The crescent Moon (28th Sept) was blended with a contrast reduced full Moon of a different libration (March 2005) so the blended result is not what could have been seen on 28th Sept due to the difference in libration.
The blended Moon was then layered on the combined wide field using common background stars to register the position of the limb. I estimated that the accuracy would be around ± 3 arc mins overall. The “time” of the composite represents how this scene may have appeared around 7:00pm AEST (GMT+10) as I did not start capturing images until after 7:26pm AEST due to clearing and intermittent cloud.
M4 from the ST7E image (May 2003) was layered on the (less populous) M4 image from the Pentax *ist DS using common stars to register the outline. The ST7E image (B&W) was reduced in contrast and a noise filter applied to blend the dimmer stars into the background so it did not appear too dense or too deep compared to the much weaker Pentax *ist DS image (colour).
The overall image has been rotated 90 deg CCW to make it pictorially more pleasing.
This (old) post has “come back to life” because of the upcoming repeat of this celestial arrangement, on 24th April 2008. Refer Astronomy 2008 and AS&T Mar/Apr 2008 Issue.
what a great picture. this has been put together perfectly. You dont need to change anything. **** if I could get a collections of pics good enought o put together that was half as good I would be wrapped.
A very true artists impression of the conjunction. On my monitor (which happens to be an absoloute whopper of an LCD) the line is somewhat visible but not enough that I would consider changing anything...
![[1ponders]'s Avatar](../vbiis/customavatars/avatar45_9.gif){kind=avatar}
It will depend on your monitor settings, but on mine the vertical border between the left red half and the black half to the right of the Moon is very obvious, as is the red circle around the Moon. I did a quick level adjustment in the Gimp to get rid of it, hope you don't mind.
