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I managed to capture a single image of the moon before the clouds came over and conditions deteriorated. The trouble is I have no idea what it is that I have imaged except that it is near the terminator of a waxing half moon.

Based on the image scale the crater is about 70 miles across (1024 x 768 pixels at ~0.125 arcsec/ pixel - same set up as used below for Jupiter. 800 frames , 8.4 ms, gain 154 on ASI 715MC camera over about 35s.

Thanks if anyone knows. The detail looks quite good - resolving well below an arcsec based on pixel peeping.

Tim

Virtual Moon Atlas https://ap-i.net/avl/en/download

Dave

Tim

Looks like Arzachel (bottom left, red dot).



Dave

Thanks Dave! I thought that you would be the one to know how to identify it. It was the first time I had looked at the moon with quite such a long focus/ small pixel set up and didn't realise how easy it is to get lost on the lunar surface. I can see me using the mosaic tool down the line -- I also found it very difficult to get rid of colour castes when using the MC camera so the picture above was actually converted to B/W to avoid the appearance of mossy green crater rims.

Tim

Tim

For any troublesome moss you can try a quick SCNR in PixInsight.

For colour lunar battles see viewtopic.php?p=29623 particularly post #10. That image ended up on a Tesco cushion as a Christmas present for my grand-daughter.

More recently I have been experimenting setting the colour balance for R & B as both 50 with my ASI120MC.

With filters on mono images, I have had good results with:

• low elevation, Wratten #25 (red)

• high elevation, IR685

Lunar imaging thoughts:

• Starting out imaging - "the moon is an easy object because it is big and bright"

• 5 years later - "the moon is a difficult object because it is big and bright"

Dave

Thanks again Dave -- yes SCNR would have been a better approach -- and that final mineral moon picture was superb - I remember reading the thread at the time although it wasn't so relevant to anything that I was doing at the time. The virtual lunar atlas seems very useful too-- so I do plan to finally start having a go at more moon stuff with the 12 inch because - as you say - it is well suited to the task.

One feature of Virtual Moon Atlas I find useful is the Ephemeris tab. By entering a date/time in the future and clicking Compute, the display shows the illuminated moon at that date/time - useful for planning lunar imaging sessions.


Dave