Full Moon

[umasscrew39]

It's been a very long time since I attempted a lunar or planetary image, as I mostly do deep sky objects nowadays. However, we had a beautiful full moon the other night, so I swung my scope towards it just to see if I could get a nice capture. Using my deep sky setup, I wasn't sure how well it would come out, but I was very pleased with the result. Taken with a ZWO ASI2600MM with an Astronomik 6nm Ha filter on a Takahashi FSQ85-EDX. I simply captured some 30s ser videos with SC and used PPI and AS! to pre-process them, followed by Photoshop Lightroom and PixInsight for some minor postprocessing.

Lr test-160_PI moon_Crp.jpg (626.57 KiB) Viewed 657 times

[Menno555]

Nice one, Bruce!
Question: why a Ha filter and not a IR Pass filter? Here an IR Pass filter would result in more contrast and detail, plus it suffers less from seeing.

Menno

[umasscrew39]

Thanks, Menno!!

Here is the silly answer to your very good question. I had just finished shooting a narrowband deep sky object and my 5-position filter wheel is bolted to my optical train in my observatory that is over 8 ft above the observatory floor. So, to change filters is a big ordeal. It was simply easier to use the Ha filter. See, I told you it was a silly answer

Bruce

[Menno555]

Ha, that's no silly answer Bruce, it's just a practical solution
Did it myself too but I was just super lazy: I don't have wheel and scope is on my balcony. I just didn't feel like taking my image train apart

Menno

[turfpit]

Bruce

That turned out well with the Ha filter - one way of taming the brightness at full moon. Some craters plus the rays from Tycho and Copernicus captured.

I did some experimental processing of lunar data using PixInsight, details here viewtopic.php?t=5636

Dave

[umasscrew39]

Bruce

That turned out well with the Ha filter - one way of taming the brightness at full moon. Some craters plus the rays from Tycho and Copernicus captured.

I did some experimental processing of lunar data using PixInsight, details here viewtopic.php?t=5636

Dave

Very nice work, Dave. I rarely do lunar, so guys like you who do this a lot know far better than me how to get good images of the moon and planets. I have gotten very proficient using PI for DSOs and LHE just may be the best kept secret in PI. It works wonders on DSOs and your use of it on the lunar surface worked great. I did not use it on this image but I did use the script, DarkStructureEnhance at 20%. The default at 40% is too strong. It isn't really meant for this purpose but it was fun to experiment with it.