Hello,
This particular view of the waning crescent Moon has eluded me for a few years now, due variously due to timing, weather or seeing conditions. Today, (17th May, 5:10am to 5:40am) everything came together and I was able to grab around a dozen avi’s with the DMK31 at the prime focus of the Tak Mewlon 180 F12.
As expected, when the Moon climbed higher the seeing generally improved as the thicker layers of our atmosphere were left behind, with the last avi being captured in twilight. The Moon’s altitude during the capture period spanned some 25 to 32 degrees.
I left it to the Edit / Auto-Align and Edit / Auto-Blend functions within CS5 to assemble the mosaic, although with hindsight I think that some manual intervention may have improved the overall result. I’ll leave that for a cloudy night or rainy day.
Just for a comparison, I have included a photo taken with the Canon 40D and 400mm F5.6 telephoto with the Canon x2 Extender, an effective focal length of 800mm at F11.
1st image: 1024 pix (Mewlon)
2nd image: 1600 pix (Mewlon)
3rd image: 1024 pix (Canon)
Cheers
Dennis
