Daybreak at Clavius and Tycho

[timh]

Maybe the first thing everyone does when they get a new telescope is to look at the moon? I sold my 250 mm Dob and upgraded to an Orion Optics (UK) Ltd. 300 mm F 4.0 VX12 Newtonian which is (just about) light enough to sit on the CEM70 mount.

First light - was to test it on a couple of star fields and then the southern uplands of the moon. Focusing was just manual. Here a SER file was captured over 3 min in Sharpcap comprising 3880 x 2 ms frame. The optical train was an IR/UV filte, parracor SW coma corrector and an AS1294 MM mono camera at gain 40 set at1600 x 1200 frame size and at 11Mb (~0.8 arcsec/ pixel).

Processing exactly followed the recipes contained within Turfpit's tutorials (thanks Dave) except that a) here I used the PIPP quality algorithm to first pick out the top 30% of frames before further selecting the top 25% of the rest in AS and b) ended up sharpening the TIFF file from Autostakkert using the Registax wavelet tool - slight tweaks on just the upper three levels. Looking forward to improvement with practice, a Barlow , smaller fields and proper electronic focusing etc. but quite happy with this as a first light image.

Tim

[turfpit]

Very nice Tim, the light was good for showing detail in the craters. Try stacking with drizzle 1.5 in AS. Thanks for the hat tip.

Dave