17th Feb Moon

[midnight (Darrin)]

Dear All,

Well after 3 mths of driving 12,000km west to east & back, travelling o/s to the US, getting married, moving houses etc I have been desperate to get back into imaging.

My poor ol LXD55 suffered the wrath of 12,000km in the trailer through 45 Deg temps out near Southern Cross WA to 38 Deg, 100% humidity, through to bull dust, vibration, and the heaps of rain over east (ps Dust + rain after hypertune = oohhhh noooo!!).

So on the return back home, ye ol LXD has come thru albeit with a missing locking wingnut on the south leg and erratic as Herbie Hancock!!

Anyway, I managed to get 30 images on my 40D, stacked with Registax (it appears to have struggled to the top left of the image) and wavelet applied mainly 6:1 and then Photoshop to crop and adjust the levels.

Fairly rough processing and hence a little "blue" but please enjoy and your critique/feedback is most appreciate no matter how harsh or good.

Cheers.
Darrin...

[rcheshire (Rowland)]

Darrin. That's nicely in focus. Would you mind posting the details - lens aperture, etc

[mswhin63 (Malcolm)]

Lovely detail especially for a full moon or there-abouts

[midnight (Darrin)]

Originally Posted by rcheshire

Darrin. That's nicely in focus. Would you mind posting the details - lens aperture, etc

Thanks Rowland! Yes focus was difficult but this time attention paid to keeping the camera solidly mounted.
Meade LXD55 8"SN with a Canon 40D at prime focus (F4, 812mm). 1/1000th, ISO 100, mirror lockup enabled. 42 RAWs taken via EOS utility on the laptop to minimise touching the camera and Registax used 30. The mount was very roughly polar aligned and still field rotation was noticeable at a pixel level when I discovered in Regi 5, in multi point alignment, point 1 and point 2 must at diagonal opposite ends of the subject with de-rotation selected. This made a huge difference. I used 27 alignment points. I also did a collimation too as the OTA mirror had moved substantially after the long trip. This also helped

Originally Posted by mswhin63

Lovely detail especially for a full moon or there-abouts

Thanks Malcolm. It has been a while so I decided to get the gear out. I didn't want to do full moon as the detail quite minimal. This is not far off but at least the edge still has some features.

[rcheshire (Rowland)]

Thanks Darrin. I will have to find a way to improve stability and overcome field rotation. My tripod is not really built for this kind of work. I don't really want to set up the GEM for moon shots. Maybe the GOTO Alt/Az will do for this type of work. It's light and easy to align. Just need to resize a dovetail plate to mount the camera.

That's a lot of work, but it sure paid off.

[midnight (Darrin)]

Rowland, if you have a DSLR and T ring, should be relatively easy. In the past, I could not get a good picture from Regi because of field rotation and not fully understanding the capabilities of Registax.

I don't know the inner workings of Regi and how much it can "de-rotate" but the DSLR moon shots should be good if the quantity of frames shot is within a short time. I also tried the hi speed capabilities of the 40D to get about 40 to 50 frames in under about 20 seconds. Even with an Alt-Azi mount, the way Registax handled field rotation after I read about the 1st and 2nd alignment "rule", this could be very possible with a basic setup.

This is another experiment to see how much Registax can handle field rotation.

Good luck!!

D...

[midnight (Darrin)]

I have done a little more work on the same image experimenting with Registax.

This image has slighter (IMO) better colour representation. But then again these can be subjective.

I hope you enjoy viewing.

Darrin...

[xcoupeb]

thats a nice image! i like this more than the first- better colour

[mswhin63 (Malcolm)]

Darrin, I am not a fan of colour images of the moon but you have done well to produce what look like a realistic colour emphasis. Also the blueish tinge has been improved nicely.

[rcheshire (Rowland)]

That's a beautiful job Darrin. Very subtle and extremely effective. Actually, I am a big fan of coloured moon images.

[midnight (Darrin)]

Thanks Rowland, Malcolm and xcoupeb for your kind words.

Processing is starting to become more important to final image than the actual taking of the images. It's amazing how easy a good raw image can be botched by dodgey processing as I was fine tuning the levels in Registax.

Cheers,
D...