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What you didn't see, or behind the scenes.
I have had some quite interesting and varied responses from posting this composite image on other forums, so for completeness I thought I would describe the assembly process – here are the details:.
The background (29th Sept) is made up of 2 Pentax *ist DS images – an Antares wide field and an M4 wide field. These 2 wide regions were aligned on common stars in both images using Corel PhotoPaint (I can't afford Photoshop!).
The crescent Moon (28th Sept) was blended with a contrast reduced full Moon of a different libration (March 2005) so the blended result is not what could have been seen on 28th Sept due to the difference in libration.
The blended Moon was then layered on the combined wide field using common background stars to register the position of the limb. I estimated that the accuracy would be around ± 3 arc mins overall. The “time” of the composite represents how this scene may have appeared around 7:00pm AEST (GMT+10) as I did not start capturing images until after 7:26pm AEST due to clearing and intermittent cloud.
M4 from the ST7E image (May 2003) was layered on the (less populous) M4 image from the Pentax *ist DS using common stars to register the outline. The ST7E image (B&W) was reduced in contrast and a noise filter applied to blend the dimmer stars into the background so it did not appear too dense or too deep compared to the much weaker Pentax *ist DS image (colour).
The overall image has been rotated 90 deg CCW to make it pictorially more pleasing.
Cheers
Dennis
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