Moon 12-11-2005

[Hitchhiker]

Here are some pictures from last Saturday night.

All images were taken with an LPI at prime focus of my 10" LX200 GPS. Images processed in Registax with a touch of unsharp masking in Paint Shop Pro.

The first picture is centred on Milichius Dome, a lunar volcanic dome (this is a very small feature!). The large crater on the left side of the image is Copernicus. The second picture is the same as the first but with a circle around the crater Milichius and the volcanic dome. The dome is just to the right of the crater.

The third picture shows the crater Gassendi on the terminator. Gassendi is the larger crater on the terminator with a smaller crater on the bottom rim. Looks like a "pearl ring". Rilles on the floor of the crater are just visible.

Picture no 4 is Rimae Hippalus, a set of rilles visible in the centre of the frame. Looks a bit like a cat has scratched a furrow on the moon!

The last picture is of Sinus Iridium. Sinus Iridium is the "bay" visible just to the right of centre. The dark floored crater at the bottom left of the frame is Plato.

Had a very pleasant evening's observation on Saturday night. The seeing was pretty good and I was joined by a friend who is just starting out in Astronomy. We looked at the moon at various powers using Virtual Moon Atlas on a laptop as our guide. VMA is absolutely brilliant to have with you as you observe the moon - there are probably a couple of lifetimes worth of interesting objects to view!

After finishing with the moon we observed Mars - again at various powers but with different filters. We found a red filter to be the best for observing surface features. After taking the pictures of the moon I put a 2X barlow on the scope, focussed and swung over to Mars. Just as I started imaging some fast moving clouds I'd been racing covered the planet! So no Mars pictures to show.

[Robert_T]

Hi Adam - great shots. Least you're getting some break in the clouds! Just wondered whether you were capturing AVI's through the LPI using something like K3CCD or whether you were saving frames and jpeg or bmp out of the LPI and processing them in registax?


cheers,

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

Nice Adam, very nice.

You're certainly right about VMA. Definately a must have for all moon aficionados. Extremely versitile and functional. A great teaching tool as well when you have newbies attending a viewing session.

[Hitchhiker]

Hi Robert_T

I'm using Autostar Envisage to capture 8 bit bmps. Autostar Envisage comes standard with the LPI and DSI. I'm not letting Envisage do any combining or processing - I do all of that in Registax with a little bit of finishing off in Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop. For these photos I took just over 400 frames each because I found I could not stack more than 500 at a time in Registax.

I've actually downloaded K3CCD plus the manual but haven't installed it yet. I'm trying to keep it relatively simple at this stage until I get a better handle on all this image processing stuff - I consider myself pretty computer literate but I'm very weak on graphics and image processing. Being a member of this forum is a big help up the steep learning curve!

Clear skies!