Another moon - With a 1.4x Canon Tele xtender

[midnight]

Hi All,

This is my first post in the non beginners section :). I've only just been getting into this astro photography stuff and learnt heaps from IIS.

Anyway, I still honing my skills on a typical beginner's target - the moon.

So here is another one taken last night.

I have been getting a lot of help from fellow members and I thought why not try prime focus via my 1.4x tele extender. So this is the Canon 40D with 1.4x extender and then prime photo into my LXD55 8" SN.

I am having much better results with a 2" aperture mask suggested by Omaroo so I have used this with the 8" OTA

So the photos were taken at F16 and 1/60th. I used Registax and wrestled with this for a few hours :bashcomp:and then had a go in Photoshop :confuse3:. I still can't work out masks etc yet so just some basic curves adjustments.

I would love to hear any suggestions for improvements, contrast and I think the colour is still - well - lifeless.

Thanks for looking :)
Cheers,
Darrin...

[Chi Sao]

Darrin looks great to me I was just given a celestron 4" and what came out of my Canon 40D to what I saw through the eyepiece was shocking LOL.


Your Moon shot is what I'd like to get.

Cheers

Jason

[mswhin63]

Great shot, I always like Prime Focus shot very little lense aberrations to deal with. I too would like to learn more about masking too. I will eventually get the hang of it.

Keep it up.

[michaellxv]

Nice shot. Lots of detail, some nice hilightes near the terminator and the lit side is not over cooked.

[koputai]

Pretty nice shot there Darrin.

I've tried using my Canon 1.4x Extender EF with the 350D, but it goes in to error mode after the shutter goes, without taking a photo. I guess it doesn't like not having a lens attached. What camera settings do you use?

Not sure I get why you'd use an aperture mask. I guess it cuts down on the sheer brightness, but wouldn't it reduce the resolving power?

Cheers,
Jason.

[midnight]

Jason,

Thanks for your kind words.

As for the extender, I too had exactly the same problem. To fix this, I covered up the contacts with black PVC tape (just enough to cover up). The camera then doesn't know the extender is there so will do prime photos without any further attachments.

As for the aperture mask, this is more of a preferrence but a suggestion was made by a fellow member (Omaroo) and I found it gave me much better focussing and a slightly better depth of field. See this thread

http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/showthread.php?t=64819

Putting the mask on doesn't change the resolving power but certainly dims it but crikey does it make a difference with focussing (esp as I have only a cheap Meade rack and pinion with a significant deadband in the gearing)

Anyway, have a go. I'm trying to get my head around the multitude of options just photographing the moon!! :D

Malcolm and Michael, thanks too for your comments. My gear is ordinary but trying some techniques gives the scope a new lease on life!!

And to Chi Sao, it took me a while to fine tune some skills. My scope is average but looking around on IIS will help point to some techniques to extract the most out of your gear until more $$$ come along. :lol:

Cheers,
Darrin...

[Chi Sao]

Darrin,

How long does it take you to load RAW files into Registax ? I took some moon shots I was happy with, the files are around 8-9 MB but it takes around 15-20 odd seconds each to load. After loading 8 or 10 it seems to only think it has 1 image and it is very dark even though I can see them easily when they are loaded.

Any ideas or possibly a link ? I've googled a few youtube registax clips but they were dealing with AVI files.

Cheers

Jason
Heres an unprocessed JPEG of one of the RAW files for size convenience

[midnight]

Jason,

I didn't load raws into Registax because I too found the same issue with Registax handling more than 10 raws and each image very dark and a funny colour :question:. I think this is because the 40D is 14bit (ie 2^14 = 16384) whereas most programs work in 16 bit (ie 2^16 = 65536) so the image appears darker. Registax has a "stretch" option but I just can't get the program to give any reasonable quality:mad2:.

Instead what I do is convert all my raws to Tiff in Canon's own Dig Photo Pro that comes with the camera. Then I load all the Tiffs into Registax and this seems to work for me.

As for time, still, it takes probably 10 odd minutes to chew through 40 or so tiffs.

I am now realising I should be doing a lot of multi point alignment points. For my moon photo, I did about 12 alignment points (multi option and using the "zoom" checkbox to get accurate alignment points with a feature on the moon).

If you're still having trouble, best to start a new thread back over in the beginners section and I'll post a few screen shots - it took me nearly 2 months to try and understand Registax and know its quirks. Initially, it's not intuitive in so far as to the options unless you a seasoned user.

Good luck!!

Darrin...