Category Archives: lunar

Nov 2017 Lunar Mosaic

The 4th November 2017 gave me clear skies with a very bright moon in the sky – this gave me  good opportunity to use the rebuilt 14″ Newtonian scope for some imaging work, now that the scope truss tubes have been correctly milled down to the right length. 

Using the ASI120MM camera with a 742nm nr-IR filter, I imaged the moon at its native focal length (1582mm), using Firecapture to grab the video. The data totalled 56GB in all!

The finished mosaic consists of 18 frames: each of these was the result of stacking the best 12%  (quality-wise) of 3000 frames. Each of the frames were 0.18ms each (with gain set to 54), and were captured at around 31 frames per second.  To try to avoid issues with exposure mismatch, all the exposure details were kept identical throughout the 36 minutes  or so it took to complete the whole set of videos across the face of the moon.

99% Moon on 2017-11-04
Mosaic of 99% Moon on 2017-11-04 at 80% resolution (3MB image size)

The videos captured were aligned and stacked using Autostakkert2, and each of the stacked images were processed using identical wavelet settings in Registax6. 

To create the mosaic itself, I took all the images into Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE) and let it get on with the process of aligning and stitching the images together. It did a remarkably good job! I had also tried the Photomerge function in CS4, but ICE did a better job here: Photomerge was good but left a couple of slight merging artifacts – misalignments on the limb, mostly. 

Final processing took place in Photoshop (smart sharpening, levels, curves, etc) with the result being a 20Mpixel image weighing in at 7+ MB for a high quality jpg. Here, I’ve reduced the image to 80% of the original resolution to aid web viewing!

Images were taken starting at 2215UT from West Oxfordshire, UK. 

Total Lunar Eclipse – Sept 28th 2015

A way overdue gallery post, as I have finally managed to sort and post my images of the September 2015 Total Lunar Eclipse. The weather was excellent in Oxfordshire for this event which started at 01:11UT and finished at 06:22UT.

This eclipse occurred with the moon close to perigee, and appeared very dark to the naked eye. Our daughter (aged 5) even got up in the middle of the night to have a look through Daddy’s telescope at the moon and did this amazing drawing the next morning all by herself!

Abi's Amazing Lunar Eclipse Drawing

My image around maximum eclipse was used on the Oxford Mail website as the header image for the article on the event. The gallery below is a selection of images from all the ones I took – these were all taken using a Nikon D70s through a William Optics 110FLT. Exposures range from fractions of seconds for the partial phases, right up to 10 seconds for the images at maximum, which shows the range of brightness across the whole eclipse. My imaging finished at about 6am when the moon was occulted by the garden fence so I didn’t quite get the last stages of the eclipse (though I got an hour or so back in bed before work)!

Lunar Imaging Gallery – 16th May 2016

Some further lunar work – as before I worked using the ASI120MM in combination with a 2x Barlow lens and the 742nm near-IR filter through the 350mm Newtonian.

A productive evening, with six images of good quality in what was at times fairly good seeing – I would like to try running at a slightly higher scale (by using a different Barlow). i do have a 4x Imagemate, but I’m not sure the quality or the resultant focal length would work quite as well.

As it turned out, this was an evening where I bagged a few of the double ringed (concentric) craters on the moon, as well as some interesting Rille features and domes.

Images are as follows:

Clavius with Longomontanus, Scheiner and Blancanus – a good amount of detail in this image and I’m especially pleased with the detail within Rutherfurd (on the southern edge of Clavius). Street M is visible with a small concentric craterlet within.

Longomontanus and Clavius, 2016-05-16

Moretus, with some very good detail coming out of the wall and surrounds. The lunar south pole region (with Newton tucked just behind the hills) is to the bottom of the image.

Moretus, 2016-05-16

Copernicus – a classic lunar crater, and one where I’ve got a much better result than I’ve previously acheived. I particularly like the collapsed edge visible to the south – perhaps a little more scale might just let me sharpen up the detail within the crater a little… Also visible are the Hortensius domes (to the left in the image) lying just to the north of the crater of the same name – lunar domes are shield volcanoes which often have a small craterlet at the peak.

Copernicus, 2016-05-16

 

Rimae Hippalus and surrounds. So much going on in this region – bullialdus by itself is a nice looking crater, and nearby the complex rille structures of Rimae Hippalus cut across Hippalus and the surrounding regions, leading up to Agatharchides. The lunar dome Kies Pi is easily visible and concentric crater Marth in Palus Epidemarium is also present in the bottom right of the image.

Rimae Hippalus and Surrounds, 2016-05-17

Another busy nearby field, showing Pitatus, concentric craters Hesiodus A and Marth. Lots of rilles also visible, including Rimae Hippalus, Rimae Ramsden, Rima Hesiodus, rilles in Pitatus, and Rima Campanus cutting between Campanus and Mercator. Kies Pi is again obvious.

Mare Nubium and Palus Epidemiarus, 2016-05-16

A view north of Bullialdus including the interesting “rippled” texture between Darney and Euclides.

Bullialdus and Mare Nubium, 2016-05-16

The last two make a rather nice mosaic, though this was a quick job and I haven’t tried too hard to eliminate the edge of field noise, or the slight mismatch between levels.

Bullialdus Region - Mosaic

Lunar Imaging – 17th Mar 2016

I took the opportunity to do some further imaging of the Moon and Jupiter during a clear evening on the 17th March – as is common, the moon was high, and the transparency wasn’t great for any narrowband work, and as such it gave me an opportunity to work more on some high resolution work.

The seeing wasn’t great, and I took a different approach to imaging this time by using subframes on the ASI 120MM to get a high frame rate and allow large numbers of frames to be captured (thus increasing the chance of capturing good frames).

Images as below are of Clavius, Tycho, Rupes Recta (the Straight Wall) and Rima Birt, and Vallis Alpes (Alpine Valley) with the central rille (just!).

Clavius 2016-03-17, 20:02UT

Tych 2016-03-17, 20:27UT

Rupes Recta and Rima Birt 2016-03-17

Vallis Alpes 2016-03-17, 20:18UT

Conjunction – Moon and Jupiter

A very quick post of the conjunction tonight between the Moon and Jupiter. I find these types of conjunction notoriously hard to photo, especially close to full moon. This is mostly due to the wide field required and the difference in brightnesses between the two objects.

I’ve tweaked the curves a little within Photoshop to allow both objects to be displayed without blitzing out the lunar details – but the eye is much better at coping with these scenarios with its non-linear response and massive dynamic range!

The wider field of the Nikon lens for these photos shows just how good telescope optics are as well compared to “standard” DSLR lenses – there is a fair bit of blue fringing around the moon’s eastern limb, which isn’t particularly obvious in photos through the Takahashi FC60 or the William Optics FLT110.

Moon Jupiter Conjunction - 23rd Feb 2016