With the recent plethora of afocal moonshots being exhibited here I thought I would add mine into the mix.
The following photos were taken over a week ago using my 12.5" dob and 25mm cheap silvertop plossl with a 2Mp Canon Powershot A40 handheld. The different magnifications have come from the camera optical zoom and not from changing eyepieces. The 25mm plossl in my dob gives about 76x.
There has been no processing on the images (apart from resize and save at lower quality)
Here's the first one.....
Last edited by astro_south; 22-05-2005 at 10:40 PM.
Thanks Paul. The original shows the little craters on Mare Serenitatis much better....all but lost after the resize/resample and save at around 75% quality.
Nice shots Andrew !
I will have to give it a go with my wife's Canon A70 to see what I can get.
I have a Universal Camera Adaptor on the way so Ill have to give it a good go next week !
I have been playing around with a snapshot digital tonight, not a patch on the A40 shots you have here !
Paul, here is a crop from the original image of Mare Serenitatis (saved at 90% ) that hopefully doesn't loose too much of the small crater detail on it
Andrew, the 3rd shot, look towards the lower right hand side, there's very little in the way of bumps and spots between the craters. Lunar images can look like that as a result of aggressive noise removal using a program such as "NeatImage".
If you've done no processing, it's possible the camera has done some internal sharpening and noise removal.
I think I see what you mean. The original image is 1600x1200 and I used Irfanview to resize/resample the image down to 800x600. Perhaps in this process it was smoothed a little. I used the point and shoot options on the camera with the only unusal setting being the "close in" option for focus. Everything else was automatic and decided on by the camera. Perhaps it did do some noise reduction in the capture. I don't really know.
Maybe the image at the eyepiece is focused for the centre of the moon (ie top left hand corner of image) and due to the curvature of the moon the focus softens down towards the lower right. I don't know if this is true or can happen..just a thought.
Mike - another thought is it could be outer edge performance of the eyepiece softening, or the fact that I had zoomed in a little with the camera. E-mail me if you want the original to examine and play with.
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) that hopefully doesn't loose too much of the small crater detail on it
L.
