Eratosthenes - a crater!

[iceman (Mike)]

Yes, it's the moon!

Went out last night for some imaging, but found the seeing to be typically bad. What I have found since, is that it's easier to get a decent image of the moon in bad seeing, than it is to get a decent image of Jupiter in bad seeing.

I took about 25 avi's of the moon last night, but because the seeing was so bad, the processing routine is very lengthy. This is the first finished image (which used 4 of those avi's).

It's the crater Eratosthenes and surrounds.. I love the crater chain off to the right.

I used the 3x barlow, 30fps on the DMK21AF04 and captured about 1000 frames in each avi. My tracking is not very accurate on the moon, so I had to use bits and pieces from the 4 avi's to make up this mosaic.

Processing involved 17 point MAP processing, which has taken 6 hours on and off to finish. The pieces were assembled in photoshop, before being flattened, and taken to AstraImage for LR deconvolution (18 @ 1.6), and finally back to Photoshop for high-pass filtering and levels adjustment.

Very lengthy and time consuming, but it's worth it as the final result is much better than what I would've got with a single run through registax. I can't wait for the next version of registax!

I've got some avi's of this area (as well as Plato and Vallis Alpes) with the 5x powermate as well, will start chugging through them when time permits.

Thanks for looking.

[matt]

Nice Mike

It's funny how we tend to start out looking at and imaging the moon and then move on to planets to refine those skills and give ourselves a new challenge/s...

and in your case come back to the good ol' moon to practice new skills.

[ving (David)]

theres some fine detail in that mike. I like the detail in the bottom of the crater

[sheeny (Al)]

Good one Mike! Great detail especially considering the seeing, so well done on the processing I say!

Al.

[Robert_T]

Mike thisis amazingly good. I really do need to get into this MAP processing whatever th hell it is. Extracting an image like this from poor seeing is like the alchemist dream of turning lead into gold

[ving (David)]

hiya robert.
mikes 17 point map processing (unless he has got the registax4 beta) involves aligning in one point then starting agian in another the starting again in another... etc 17 times... its long and involved.... then combining all 17 images into one. not hard but time consuming

like i said, unless he has registax4 beta... well do ya mike?

[joe_smith]

Ving where is registax4 beta I can only find info on V3.1.0.24

Nice pic Mike very good detail looks like you are hovering over the moon

[Dennis]

Hi Mike

Well, you mastered the dob, mastered the ToUcam and now it looks like you are mastering the DMK.

Great image for those difficult conditions and it gives me great pleasure to see your well deserved successes after all the hard yards.

Cheers

Dennis

[iceman (Mike)]

Thanks for your feedback guys.

I don't have registax 4 - all of the MAP processing was manually done.. that's why it took so long and was so frustrating!

The seeing fluctuated up to 5/10 at times, but then back down to 1/10 at other times. So I took the average of 3

I love imaging the features on the moon, but it's all the more difficult for me given my tracking is not that accurate - especially at long focal lengths and a large crater takes up most of the 640x480 FOV.

Thanks for your nice words Dennis, it means a lot.

[hevelsky]

Hi
Very nice image Mike
amazing detail considering the seeing

[joe_smith]

found a howto about "Multi-Alignment Point processing with Registax". and it dose mention a new version of Registax is in the wind

http://www.astronomy.com/ASY/CS/foru.../ShowPost.aspx