Luna: Aristarchus - 6th August

[iceman]

Here's the last of my lunar sessions from the 3rd and 6th of August.. phew, glad they're finally done..

Here's Aristarchus again, this time with the 3x barlow in below average seeing.

The mosaic is made up of 4 avi's covering roughly the same area. 17 alignment points were used in MAP processing to arrive at the final composite in photoshop, which then had LR deconvolution applied in AstraImage.

Finally, photoshop was used for high-pass layer filtering and levels adjustment.

Thanks for looking. I can finally archive those nights work and stop looking at them!

[Robert_T]

A magic, mysterious, bit of lunar landscape this one Mike... I can almost imagine the lava flowing over the plains:D

With your Map processing what determines or how do you decide the number of alignment points you use? Also interested with the High pass filtering are you using the Ideal High Pass or the Butterworth?

cheers,

[iceman]

Thanks Rob, I love the many faint rilles to the left and below aristarchus.

For MAP processing, I just keep going until i've eliminated all (or most) of the soft areas. I mainly concentrate on the "features", or where there's high contrast areas and something for registax to align on. I can't do it on the mare's for example, as registax just can't find enough contrast to lock on to, especially with the bad seeing. I have to click "ignore" sometimes 20+ times while it's trying to align as it can't find the feature.

I use a 128px alignment box, and my tracking is not very accurate.. so sometimes my final image is made up from several avi's which cover the broader area.. I can't keep the same area in the FOV for long enough, usually, which means the edges don't have much data and end up with artifacts after sharpening..

The high-pass filtering is in photoshop - i'm not sure what the equivalent is in other tools. I duplicate the layer, and then on the duplicate I do a "Filter -> Other -> High pass". I use a value of about 2.5 to 3, but that can change depending on the image.

I then set the blending mode to "hard light", which usually overprocesses/oversharpens the image. So I change the opacity of that layer to 20-30% (personal taste), so only some of the sharpening is revealed.

Once happy, I then flatten the image and save for web.

[Dennis]

Hi Mike

Once again, that is a gob smacking image of a very interesting piece of lunar real estate. It seems the seeing is making you work very hard to squeeze the finest detail out of the image, but from the viewer’s perspective, the effort is very much appreciated!

More great work, well done, especially in controlling the highlights to retain detail in the very bright Aristarchus.

Cheers

Dennis