First real close-up attempt Moon

[mswhin63 (Malcolm)]

Hi All,

I decided to place this images here as I am still coming to grips with close-ups. I know seeing was quite reasonable so I am not sure why the clarity is not the best or whether I am expecting too much.

I am not going to image for a while after this attempt until I get some processing down pat and while I clean out and organise my 3TB hard drives that are getting concernably low on memory.

Although AVIStack is doing well on my Jupiter images, it is not doing well on my moon shots. Colours and contrasts are changing dramtically while stacking moon shots while Registax is preserving the contrast.

Anyway I would really like some opinions on the processing.


The Barlow I am using I believe is excellent for visual it is letting me down for imagery. I am now planning to purchase a powermate or 2 for imaging but am concerned about cost versus performance. I would love to test one if i can lay my hands on one.

1. ASWA Lunatiks event - 16/10/2010 - unknown area fully processed with AVIStack (Alignment issues)
2. ASWA Lunatiks event - 16/10/2010 - unkonow again fully processed with Registax.
3. Backyard -23-10-2010 - Full Moon close processsed with AVIStack - My favorite area curious about the composition of the ground in this area. ARISTARCHUS and KEPLER

I will play around with the total of 350,000 frames for the 2 days to come up with some better results.

[midnight (Darrin)]

G'Day Malcolm.

I've been trying out the 2x & 5x Powermate on my LXD55 8" and quite frankly, very impressed with it visually and also for astro photography. I am keen on buying one or both!!

Unfortunately with a major power station outage just about to start, I'm going to be out of action for a few weeks but I'm keen to get a good few hours comparison between the 5x and my existing Baader 2x and prime.

As I have been spending a lot of learning on the moon in Aug/Sep, I found Registax really shines when you give it plenty of alignment points on (for eg my 40D prime, I found having about 20 alignment points had a far superior alignment improvement than say 2 or 3)

Anyway, I would have to say I like the target in the 1st, the 2nd looks like an alignment problem (a noticeable line running from 5 o'clock to 11 o'clock). How many alignment points did you use in this one? Third one looks pretty good. What camera did you use?

Cheers,
Darrin...

[mswhin63 (Malcolm)]

I am using the webcam for imaging all the time now, I will be using the DSLR primarily for deepsky widefield in the near future.

I hope one day to be able to snag the captures, could be focus, not colmination as this was better setup than my jupiter images from 03-10-2010.

I am using a 3 x Barlow but has 5-elements maybe 5 elements are too many for CCD. Cost a fair bit although not as much as the powermate. Not sure if the 5 x powermate might be too much to align with my mount.

[midnight (Darrin)]

Originally Posted by mswhin63

I am using a 3 x Barlow but has 5-elements maybe 5 elements are too many for CCD.

Can you please elaborate as I am still trying to learn the finer aspects of inner lens designs. You mention 5 element may be too many - why?

My LXD55 is a shocker to align but I found once I centred with a 10mm eyepiece, I stuck in the Powermate and fine slew pretty good. Albeit the FL is 4060mm with the Powermate and still managable.

I have seen the Powermate 5x for US$170. G11 with Gemini for US$3050. Tempting since I'm heading off to the US in mid Dec for a few days. But I don't think bringing back a G11 is not going to raise a few eyebrows with the airlines and/or customs . Might just stick with the little items for now

Regards,
Darrin...

[michaellxv (Michael)]

Hmmm, so my 'expert' opinion

The first one looks pretty good in terms of detail and focus. The tones look good too. It just looks noisy which you can see in the dark areas. But
I really couldn't say how to fix it. Maybe one of the real experts knows?

The second one looks a bit soft on focus, but could be due to turbulance. I was sketching the moon last night and was amazed at how much the image expands and contracts under high mag.

The last one looks nice and sharp. A bit of processing artifact in the top left but that can be cropped. Although it does seem wider than the normal edge I get on lunar shots.

[ballaratdragons (Ken)]

My guess:

Image 1:
If done in Registax - Overdone in Wavelettes
If not done in Registax - restack in Registax

Image 2:
If done in Registax - not enough wavelettes
If not done in Registax - restack in Registax

Image 3:
Looks niiiiiice

[mswhin63 (Malcolm)]

I am not saying it can be fixed but for the last year I have missed an operation in registax and since reading up some of my Jupiter shots have improved immensely. I am still fixing up memory isse on my storage drive and will attempt to reprocess some of these.

I am not starting to lean towards Registax again especially for Jupiter and maybe i can do something for the moon as well.

Seeing was quite poor when I did the first 2 moon shots and the 3 image was done on a different day and without the barlow, not as much seeing issues with that.

[mswhin63 (Malcolm)]

Originally Posted by ballaratdragons

My guess:

Image 2:
If done in Registax - not enough wavelettes
If not done in Registax - restack in Registax

Thanks Ken for the incentive not to give up on these images. It turns out that there are a few features in Registax that I needed to implement a long time ago to get better images. The image attached here maybe a little over processed as I was playing around with a few settings without realising I was pushing the boundaries. At least I know i can push them back again. Seeing was not really the best I went through frame by frame and surprised how bad seeing was at the time.

I learn't a lot this time around, thanks all for the comments.

[irwjager (Ivo)]

Hi Malcolm,

Pretty cool closeups! If that's a webcam, you're getting some awesome results with it.
In the first image, I can clearly see color shift (chromatic aberration). My el-cheapo barlow suffers from the same problem.

Fortunately, it's easy to fix in software; simply shift the red channel a few pixels up, down, left, right and the blue channel in the exact oppposite direction until the fringing goes away. Even better; Registax should have an automatic option (I can't recall what it's called, but it's something like "RGB align").

I found that if I shifted blue up by about 4 pixels and red down by about 2, the image looks great!

Hope that helps,

[mswhin63 (Malcolm)]

Thanks for that, I have been using the colour align feature a lot more after this shot. Still would like to make sure they are good captures other than fix-ups. Made some improvements with past Jupiter shot too.

It is a webcam, and has been doing well for me. I dropped it recently and is still working.