Quote:
Originally Posted by strongmanmike
Ok so I can see the overall striation effect, presumably caused by the BMask but through that the resolution certainly "looks" amazing  ...so is this an optical illusion or is the spacial resolution really top notch?
Excuse my ignorance but I am not a planetary master 
Mike |
Hi Mike
I’m not sure about what is going on here, but from what I understand, a bone fide "apodizing mask" dumps energy from the central diffraction spike and disperses it into the surrounding diffraction rings. From the links I visited, double star observers use this technique to split difficult doubles, especially where the companions have a large magnitude differential.
There are some thoughts that this technique should not work on obstructed optics such as the Mewlon, as the central obstruction itself lessens the intensity of the central diffraction spike.
It may be that the larger brightness range of the lunar features were levelled a little by the accidental inclusion of the Bahtinov Mask and coupled with the above average seeing, produced some pleasing results. Maybe the real signal was reinforced and the random noise was diminished as a result of the mask?
I’ll have to wait for the optics heavy weights to wade in, as my knowledge on this topic is quite basic.
Cheers
Dennis