Quote:
Originally Posted by Akwestland
Dennis,
These are some great images. I love the detail, mountains and shadows, rivers etc. Since starting in astronomy 12 months ago I have become obsessed with the moon (I never get bored looking at it and identifying areas). I love the detail that these pics have. What equipment/exposure settings/process was used here. I am slowly getting the gear together to start on some imaging.
Andrew.
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Thanks Andrew and Kim, the Moon is an amazing place to explore through a telescope. I used a Takahashi Mewlon 180 F12, a Televue x2 Powermate and a ZWO ASI174M CMOS camera.
The ASI174M records a “movie file” (AVI) and in this case, I recorded 2000 Frames. I used the application “FireCapture v2.4” to control the camera and save the AVI.
I then used “AutoStakkert!2” to open the AVI and the program then aligns and stacks all the frames together, based on user inpout such as say, only select the top 25% of frames (best image quality) or just the top 300 frames. This means that you can select the frames that were recorded when the seeing was at its best and discard those where the image was mushy or fuzzy due to atmospheric turbulence.
This process improves the signal to noise ratio. That is, the real data which is present on every frame is reinforced whereas the random noise is averaged out.
The camera settings were: Exposure 13.5 milliseconds, Gain=230 with a Gamma=50.
Hope that helps.
Cheers
Dennis