Large Lunar Mosaic of the Greek Philosophers

[iceman (Mike)]

Hi all

This data was captured on Sunday 21st October 2007, and has taken me most of the week to process. The seeing wasn't quite up to long focal length imaging, so I reduced the scale (to the 2x barlow) and captured a wide area around Plato.

The image is made up from 11 avi's, and like almost all of my mosaics, I missed a piece Glad I don't do jigsaw puzzles

Each avi had MAP processing (some auto, some manual), with around 250-300 frames stacked for each alignment point. The pieces were assembled in Photoshop, before being taken to AstraImage for deconvolution and back to Photoshop for final touchups (levels, curves, noise reduction).

12" newt on EQ6, 2x barlow + DMK21AF04 + Astronomik R filter.

Please click the link below to see the full version (< 1 meg) - it's too large to upload as an attachment.

Mosaic of the Greek Philosophers - Plato through to Aristoteles and up to Archimedes (~980kb)

Make sure you expand your browser to see the full version.

Thanks

[Dennis]

Hi Mike

A wonderful mosaic. I am particularly impressed with the image scale, overall sharpness, smoothness, content and how natural the whole mosaic looks. It has a purely photographic quality about it; not a hint of any processing artefacts. Well done.

A lot of work goes into these projects, but they are so well worth that effort when you see the finished product. Thanks!

Cheers

Dennis

[tornado33]

Fantastic work there. Yes excellebt processing, certainly not over or under done. I love the flat crater near bottom and mountain islands in the seas.
Scott

[Kal (Andrew)]

I love the way how you have masked the missing piece with the image information

Loevly detail and a nice balance of contrast through the image

[RB (Andrew)]

Absolutely stunning work Mike.

Well done.

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

Top stuff Mike. Very smooth.

I know what you mean about missing a piece of a mosaic. Some one needs to develop a program that compares the avi you have taken against a master screen so that when you turn the DMK off it goes "HEY Knuckle Head (or some other suitable catch call)!!!! You've missed a bit over here!!" and then points to the area you've missed

[Dietmar]

...that is tremendously beautiful!
even the central rim on the bottom of vall. alp.!
what many try to image a life time you have in your image as extra.
congrats on a truly terrific image, Mike!

[erick (Eric)]

The rille, Dietz? I notice that Mike was capturing this a year ago with his 10" newtonian dob.

http://www.lpod.org/?m=20061020

[iceman (Mike)]

Thanks for your comments. You're right Dennis - they are a lot of work, but the results do make it worthwhile.

Next time, I'll spend some more time and capture a wider area and make sure I don't miss anything!

I captured the rille the night before also, but at high resolution (attached). It's interesting to see the same feature at different resolutions. The one attached was with the 5x powermate, the one above was with the 2x barlow.

[jakob]

Mike, Fantastic View! Amazing details.
Congratulations.
J.