Waning gibbous moon- using an HA filter

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timh
Posts: 515
Joined: Mon Aug 26, 2019 5:50 pm

Waning gibbous moon- using an HA filter

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Post by timh »

A couple of mosaics from images taken at around 12.-12.30 am UT on successive mornings - 22 and 23 Nov 2021.

SW 200 PDS F 5.0 Newtonian, Baader MkIII MPC coma corrector, Baader steeltrack focuser, Pegasus Cube focus motor control, Ioptron CEM70 mount.

ZWO AS1294 MM mono camera in 46 Mb mode, pixel size 2.315uM ADU 12 bit --> ~ 0.45 AS/ pixel

IMAGE 1 - 2 part mosaic of day's end at the Mare Crisium 22 Nov

5000 x 20ms 1920 x 1080 sized frames at gain 124 (~unity) captured at 17 fps as a SER file by SharpCap. PIPP first used to select the best 30%. Autostakkert! to select and stack the best 80% of these using 1.5X drizzle into a TIFF file. Registax to adjust gamma, contrast, brightness and wavelet sharpen. Affinity Photo to combine and finally adjust curves and contrast.

IMAGE 2 - 6 part mosaic on the 23 Nov

3300 x 20ms 1600 x 1200 sized frames at gain 181 captured at 20 fps as a SER file by SharpCap. PIPP first used to select the best 30%. Autostakkert! to select and stack the best 20% of these using 1.5X drizzle into a TIFF file. Registax to adjust gamma, contrast, brightness and wavelet sharpen...settings 7.9, 4.2, 3.6 and 2.4 for the first four levels. Affinity Photo to combine and finally adjust curves and contrast.

Very experimental parameters since I am new to moon photography --- used an HA filter just to dim the bright F 5.0 image. Adjusted gain to the point that the brightest pixels about 90% saturated. Wavelet settings - simply adjusted to look OK. Percent of frames stacked in AS simply adjusted for quality > ~ 50%. Could have achieved higher fps at smaller frame size --> not at all sure of best compromise?

Steadier skies on image 2 - FWHM for stars about 2.8' - resolution of smallest lunar features just distinguishable guestimated at about 2' on the basis of the image scale. But images clearly not as sharp as folk have been achieving routinely with Schmidt Cassegrains.

Tim
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