Moon

The Moon

It's big, it's easily visible for several days each month, it never looks quite the same twice... it's easy to see why the Moon is a popular target for visual and photographic observers alike.

More moons

Here are a couple of more recent shots, one with colour enhancement, one which I've treated a little differently to prouce a more aesthetic look, and one - a nice thin crescent - which I can finally image now I've moved house, and have some kind of western horizon!:


19 Dec 2007	16 Nov 2007	9 Feb 2007

The moon in colour... take 2

After experimenting with the process below I still wasn't getting the kind of results I was hoping for. I came across Filipe Alvis' guide, which made we want another go; I then saw Gary Seronik's image in the June 2007 edition of Sky & Telescope magazine, and decided to try to emulate it. I think it came out pretty well - a nice balance of sharp monochrome detail and non-grainy colour. See what you think. (EvoStar 100ED, Canon 350D at prime - single frame)

BIG moon image

Here's an image of the moon created 27 Mar 2007, about 9 days old. I used the Canon 350D at prime focus of the 4" EvoStar, stiched and post-processed. Click on the image for the full-size - it's 6Mb and and about 3000 x 3800 pixels. (This image was published in the June 2007 edition of the Sky at Night magazine.)

Colour on the moon?

A recent edition of the Sky at Night magazine contained an article about colouration on the lunar disk. Like most people, I suppose, I'd always seen it as monochrome. However, with some processing you can bring out subtle detail of colours on the lunar surface.

This is an image of the moon from 27 Nov 2006. After trimming the brightness and contrast, I increased the colour saturation to try to bring out hidden detail. The result was very noisy, however. This image is the result of about 4 iterations of increasing the saturation, followed by using Neat Image to reduce the noise differentially in the luminance and chrominance channels. It's about the best image I had to work with at this stage; I hope to get a cleaner set of images, perhaps at full moon, to try the process again.

For comparison, here is a false-colour image exported from Virtual Moon Atlas Pro (see software page for download). This excellent free software not only shows craters and features on the moon, but has a range of overlays showing different details of the lunar geology - hydrogen, iron, thorium - as well as natural and false colour, and altitude data.

OLDER IMAGES

	This is the first picture I took of the moon. I used a Phillips SPC900 at prime focus of a NexStar 80 SLT. It's not very good :-) The colour balance is wrong, focus could be better, and it took a helpful poster on the S@N forum to tell me what part of the moon it was! I keep it to remind me that it's a learning process!
	So now that I know how to take one picture, I want to make bigger ones. This is a composite of 2 images using the same setup. It's also not very good! The join is obvious, one half is better focused than the other, there's a processing artefact to the right of Clavius... But: colour is OK, there's some nice detail, and Virtual Moon Atlas tells me that I'm seeing features just over a mile across. Not bad from 400,000km away!! Verdict: on the right track.
	Right, we're getting the hang of this. Let's take lots of pictures, and stitch them together to get a high-resolution view of the whole lunar disc. Result: Bugger! I spent hours processing the individual frames in Registax, they're all over the place with brightness and contrast, and the stitching software can't line them up. Am going to bed in a huff. This isn't as easy as it looks.
	I've got the hang of focusing and using alignment software now. I decide to repeat the above shot a few days later. I take approx 15 stacks across the moon. I process the stacks to frames. Frames look nice. I try to put the frames together... AARGH! I've only missed out part of the bloody disc! I think I should take up another hobby :-(
	BRAINWAVE I realise that if I use my Canon DSLR rather than the webcam, I should actually get better resolution, because of the denser and bigger chip, AND I shouldn't need to take as many stacks, so hopefully less chance of holes! This is approx 6 stacks with the Canon, and easily the best moon image I've done so far. Focus is nailed, nice contrast, loads of detail. It's one of my first images using the EvoStar, so I'm doubly pleased. One to print out and stick on the wall!

LINKS

Sky at Night
The forum associated with the popular BBC series. Friendly and good for beginners.

QCUAIG
Group dedicated to use and abuse of webcams and other kit for astro work.

Astro-Talk
A small, friendly, relatively new forum based in the UK.

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