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Another clear night, another moonshot…

Pleased with this one. Copernicus seems to have come out well and there are plenty of hints of high peaks beyond the terminator. Lack of sleep means I can’t recall the exact circumstances at the time of imaging, however 😀 It would have been in the small hours of Friday morning, I think pretty much the last thing I did before stopping for the night.

40 of 100 frames of 1/500th @ ISO800, Canon 450D and 127Mak. Preprocessed with PIPP, stacked in AS!3, wavelets in Registax 6 and final tweaking in PS.

I’m such a martyr, I really am 😀

It was mostly cloudy last night so I’d abandoned all hope of imaging and got into some development work on oacapture/oalive. Time passed quickly, as it does, and before I knew it 2am had arrived. As I walked through the house to go upstairs to bed I looked out of the window and could see the sky clearing and the Moon in view. So, quick change into warmer clothes, open up the observatory, wait for the cloud to clear properly and get imaging. What else?

I did get caught by a bit more cloud halfway through the run, but that soon cleared and I had another go.

For processing I took the best 100 frames of 1/500th at ISO800 as ranked by PIPP, stacked them in AS!3 (which seems to have done something strange to the framing), used wavelets in Registax 6 and had a final tinker in PS.

I quite like the way the peaks of the Appenines show up way beyond the terminator, and the nice line of large craters along the terminator to the south.

Three nights on the bounce! But this one was a bit of an adventure. What was foreast as a few of hours of clear sky after the Moon rose stopped about two minutes after I kicked off the run to collect my subs at 1:15am and I ended up with about thirty that were ok and many more that were varying shades of dark. I decided to hang around for a while on the off-chance I might get another go and just before 2am clear sky reappeared, allowing me to complete another run. In the end I had 135 passable subs and threw away 65 without even considering processing them.

1/500th subs at ISO800, preprocessed with PIPP, stacked in AS!3, wavelets in Registax 6 and finished off with PS.

Two nights in a row clear enough to get an image of the Moon! Best 45 of 100 frames from the 450D and 127 Mak again, but this time 1/500th sec exposure to try to reduce the effects of wobbly seeing, and I had to bump the ISO setting up to 800 as a result. Preprocessed with PIPP, then stacked in AS!3, wavelets in Registax 6 and a final bit of fiddling about and conversion to PNG in PS.

So, a newly-aligned mount and just past full Moon, what’s a chap to do? Well, when the sky gives you moons, make moon images!

I broke out the 127 Mak and 450D and dropped them on top of the HEQ5. It doesn’t really know where the Moon is yet because I don’t have a sufficiently good sky model, but with a little nudging I was on-target and the tracking was certainly ok.

I captured 100 frames of 1/200th at ISO200 for this image, and then had a devil of a job getting them to stack in Registax (after preprocessing with PIPP), which kept locking up during stacking. I gave up and tried stackistry. Whilst that did a mostly good job, it fouled up the limb. AutoStakkert!3 came to my rescue and gave me a stacked image that I pulled into Registax for wavelets and then finished off in Photoshop.