Lunar Terminator Thursday 7th August

[Tinderboxsky (Steve)]

Spent about an hour late evening on Thursday exploring the Lunar terminator.

Vixen NA140SS four element achromat at f11.4 (2X barlow to give 1600mm) plus Baader 495 Yellow long pass filter and the SharpCap Chromatic Aberration Correction tool. Good seeing and transparency.

I am now doing all of my Lunar observing using the SharpCap Planetary Live stacking tool - the traditional route of high speed video capture > Autostakkert > wavelet sharpening (using Wave Sharp) that I have done for years is now just too time consuming. I find there is a slight trade-off in the quality of the final image, but that is something I am prepared to live with for the convenience.

Anyhow, here is an exploration of the Terminator on Thursday evening, 7th Aug. The file name lists the dominant key feature in each image. They have lost some sharpness in the compression to fit here.

All images are taken with an ASI178mc camera and are live stacks of 1000 frames (best 15% filter) at 2.11ms each with gain of 300.

Thursday was an enjoyable and productive evening. I completed an EAA observation (with saved image) of each of the 30 targets in The Tasmanian Astro Society's Messier Galactic Bulge Challenge between 8 and 10.30pm. I then turned my attention to the Moon for the attached images and was comfortably in bed by midnight.

[astronobob (Bob)]

Cool views for 1600mm F/L Steve, and your Chromatic Aberration Correction tool seems to perform well on the 140 Achro
Stacking on the fly too, cool as ice...
I think the 3rd, 4th & 5th have a real nice finish to them, smoother and cleaner,, but yeah some my fave craters in there too, good stuff and thnx for sharing

[Saturnine (Jeff)]

Hi Steve , was doing much the same as you on Thursday evening, browsing along the terminator and enjoyed the same views that you have posted, nice images by the way. The seeing here was very good (for here) but was not in the mood to set up for imaging so just enjoyed the visual.

[Pierre_C]

Nice pictures, Steve.

The Vixen achromat seems plenty sharp. What Barlow did you use?

[h0ughy (David)]

some nice captures there