2026-04-27, 86% waxing moon

[turfpit]

Captured 26-04-27, intermittent wind gusts. Part of a 1h session which saw 130Gb captured. Since 21st April, 5 sessions has seen 0.75Tb of data acquired.


Southern Region

2026-04-27-2017_1-Moon3_Stack2_F1181_Decon_View_16b.jpg (485.92 KiB) Viewed 365 times

Copernicus & Eratosthenes

2026-04-27-2015_7-Moon3_Stack2_F0835_Decon_View_16b.jpg (455.86 KiB) Viewed 365 times

Sinus Iridum, Plato & Vallis Alpes

2026-04-27-2010_8-Moon3_Stack2_F0905_Decon_View_16b.jpg (458.16 KiB) Viewed 365 times

Rays of Tycho, 2-panel mosaic

2026-04-27-2020_0-Moon3_Stack2_F1135_Decon_View_16b_stitch.jpg (478.9 KiB) Viewed 365 times

Equipment: Celestron C8, Celestron AVX mount, Skyris 236M, Baader 610nm red pass filter, JMI MotoFocus.
Capture: MONO8, 1920x1200, exposure=5ms, gain=100, 2000 frames@54fps, 36s capture.
Processing: BiggSky - autostack, decon (denoise 0/1); Microsoft Image Composite Editor for stitching; GIMP - mild ‘S’ curve, sharpen with UnSharpMask.

Dave

[admin]

Hi Dave,

wow, you have been busy with our recent run of decent skies... Well done on all of these moon images

cheers,

Robin

[turfpit]

Thanks Robin.

There has been some gusty wind but I have played the statistics game - capture each object 5 times and keep re-focusing. That way some decent data can be acquired. Much of the data has been collected before sunset as the moon was in the right position for me.
Dave

[timh]

Great detail again. Ah so the trick was to image before sunset - as well as use an IR filter. SSD storage rates seem to have been limiting my larger-scale moon captures and anyway the moon is getting too low in the sky now. I'll wait til later in the year to have another go armed with a larger and faster external SSD.

[turfpit]

Thanks Tim. Yes, captured before sunset.

April/May will see me with a 65°elevation at the meridian. The moon is in the east before sunset. Once the sun sets, the seeing becomes worse which I think has to do with cooling. The next best time is after midnight when the atmosphere becomes steady. Early morning gets the best seeing but well before sunrise. This might all be a peculiarity of sitting on top of the Pennines where weather from the east meets weather from the west.

With the drive, you could upgrade the drive using disk cloning software (I am about to upgrade a 500Gb drive to 1Tb). That will save on a USB connection. See my reply to your disk problem for possible solutions (something to do on a rare cloudy night). The CN article was useful. I know from experience the SSD drive technology is a can of worms. As a working practice, I backup my night's data over my network to a 4Tb rugged drive on my workstation. The data on the capture laptop is cleared at the start of the next session - that ensures I am not running into fragmentation. Having a SATA drive avoids falling into the SSD Trim pit.

Dave