SharpCap Forums

99.7% waxing moon captured 18th March 2022 @ 21:29 at 23°elevation. This full moon is known as the 'worm moon' because earthworms start to appear as spring arrives.



Capture in progress.



Use Registax for sharpening & auto colour balance.


The saturation was increased in GIMP.

More work to be done on this, as I failed to achieve the blue titanium rich areas seen in other mineral moon images on Astrobin. Next attempt will be with the ZWO ASI120MC but it will have to be a 2-panel mosaic.

Dave

Nice, Dave!

I tried it a few months ago. I was happy with the color but the focus was awful due to my low-rent refractor. I don't have the image with me now nor the settings, but I remember doing two things differently:

1. I increased exposure until the RHS of the histogram saturated. I wanted to get a good SNR of the Mare since they are relatively dark.

2. I selected RAW12 instead of RAW8. I figured that RAW12 would be better at picking up the slight color variations.

I should have tried other combinations of settings but of course I didn't, so I don't know if it made any difference.

The Mineral Moon is quite a challenge!

Brian

PS: You always give great write-ups. Thanks!

Brian

The Mineral Moon is quite a challenge!

Agreed, dealing with 100% illumination is tricky. I am surprised at the number of craters that appeared.

I will try out increased histogram saturation next time. The 183 sensor is not ideal for this type of work as I only achieved 7fps - RAW12 would have turned it into spf! The ASI120MC might be a better option. I missed the hands-off focusing with the JMI on the C8 SCT.

I have not managed to find (yet) any mineral moon images on the web which give detailed settings of capture. Looks like another topic that gets played close to the chest while practising the dark arts of imaging.

You always give great write-ups

Thanks for that comment. I am always happy to try to encourage others.

Dave

Very nice Dave!

Like Brian said, your write ups are always great.
And I have some tips.
1) White balance. It's way easier to process it all if you set the white balance already during capturing. You could use Auto but doing it manually is better. Move the R and B sliders until RGB are divided equally and the moon shows "white".
2) If you want some more FPS during capturing, use RGB instead of RAW8. For this, using RGB will work just fine.
3) With processing, increase/strengthen the color in little steps. So strengthen it with for example 5%, strengthen that again with 5%, strengthen that again with 5%, and so on, until you have what you want. Doing it in 1 go causes often pixilation and the color areas will not really overlap in a good way.

Here is a mineral moon I did back in 2009. Totally different setup with a normal camera but I used the description above.
Both are the same capture but processed differently.

Menno

Thanks Menno. I will experiment with your suggested capture settings next time I try this. I applied my normal techniques for mono lunar imaging which looks like they are not the best way to acquire colour data for the mineral moon.

Playing the capture file shows that my colours are not in balance and I am really short on Blue.



Your second image is the effect I was trying to achieve. A 56 panel mosaic! As always in astro imaging, success requires effort.

Dave

Based on what was learned here viewtopic.php?t=5421, a reprocess of this data.


In GIMP, the following processing was carried out:

• Colors > Auto > White balance

• Colors > Hue-Saturation, set saturation to 50%

• Repeat the Hue-saturation step 5 times

Ah, that's indeed more a mineral moon

Menno

Hi Dave,

Just thinking that the false colour NASA image that you linked to would have been mainly done in the IR? So maybe an enhanced mineral moon is an opportunity for doing something with near-IR filters? like Menno's > 750 nm filter

https://rk.edu.pl/en/lunar-petrographic ... 20950%20nm.

Above ref uses a range of filters through visible up to near IR and ratios which could be an interesting approach? PI pixmath could be used to derive images where one wavelength is divided by another? I don't know about up above 800nm - maybe more suitable for mirrors than lenses though - and whether our CMOS cameras detect enough up there?

Tim

Tim

Thanks, very interesting link - gives ideas for some creative work to be carried out. I have an IR685 filter which I could try.

The NAS link https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagega ... e_819.html is certainly 'artistic license'.

Dave

Hi Tim,

In the past I've gotten good mineral contrast using a standard red filter (600nm to 700nm), however thanks to your link I now see that I can get better results with my under-utilized Baader Bessel "I" photometric filter. It passes between 720nm and 1100nm. The absorption bands of several minerals should show up nicely against the bright Plagioclase/anorthite.

Thanks,
Brian