Lunar Images, Current

Moon, 5 31 23

Moon image of June 10, 2022

Moon, November 9, 2020, 22:20 UT

Moon, October 15, 2021

March 20, 2021.    I took a couple of 60 second videos with the C14 equipped with the Starizona 0.63x focal reducer giving f/7, way too low for good sampling (but I was set up for live stacking of DSOs), exposure only 0.006 seconds.  The videos were processed in Autostakket3 using 1.5x drizzling to get better sampling and combined into a mosaic in Photoshop, then converted to a high dynamic range image using PhotoMatix Essentials.  To do this right, I should have removed the focal reducer and used a 2x Barlow, however, seeing was poor and I was not looking at Airy discs but rather much larger seeing blobs.

November 26 (EST), 2020.  I got eight videos of the Moon, enough for a mosaic and a couple of closeups. I used the ASI183MC at the f/14 focus of the Schupmann. Seeing was a little below average for the Mars imaging, started off about the same for the moon, but deteriorated near the end of the series for the mosaic.  I processed all the videos in Autostakkert3, using the deconvolutive sharpening provided by the program. Seems to work better than the wavelets in Registax and is much less prone to overprocessing artifacts. The 6 full frame images of the moon of the moon were combined in Photoshop to give the mosaic shown below, as are images of the northern Mare Imbrium region and a higher magnification image of the crater Plato, as shown above. Several craterlets may be seen on the floor of Plato.

July 27, 2020.  Clear tonight, average seeing.  Set up ASI183MC with NIR blocking filter at the f/14 focus of the Schupmann.  Took six one minute videos of the moon, covering the whole moon with overlap.  Using Autostakkert!2 and Registax6, each video was converted to aligned stack of the 25% best frames of 321 frames and sharpened, making no adjustment to the histogram.  These sub-images were combined intoa mosaic using Photoshop and then into an HDR image using Photomatix Essentials.  The result is shown below.  The image can take considerable enlargement.  Below the image of the entire first quarter is shown an enlarged clip of the northern terminator region passing through Mare Imbrium and another of the terminator passing through Ptolemaeus.

June 10, 2020.  After imaging the Plato Craterlets, I also took some images of other regions on the Moon. Check out the images below.  Note the craters named for Arctic explorers Peary and Byrd in the image of the North Polar Region of the Moon.

June 10, 2020.  After I took the 47 videos of Jupiter on the morning of June 10, I slewed over to the 18 day old moon that had cleared the trees to the south of my observatory and I took a series of closeups of interesting features using the same 5 meter effective focal ratio I used on Jupiter (for my usual Lunar mosaics I use a considerably shorter focal length to get a wider field). This is like using a more powerful eyepiece to zoom in to see a more magnified image. Seeing was still decent, so I was able to resolve 8 of the tiny craterlets on the floor of the crater Plato. They are marked with red X's in the middle image. The image on the right was taken by the old Lunar Orbiter back in the 70's using 35 mm film strips. That is what the parallel lines are, the edges of the film strips. These craterlets are only a mile or so across and you don't get to see them unless seeing is quite good.

Below are some enlarged clippings from the 5.13 day old crescent moon imaged on May 27, 2020.

May 26, 2020.  I obtained 5 images with the ASI174 at the f/10 focus of the LX50.  Processed two ways.  As monochrome, to give the grayscale image and as color.  The color image was pushed to maximum color saturation to reveal differences in Mare Lava composition.

March 1, 2020     After a protracted absence while recuperating from a knee replacement, Chewie and I made it out to the observatory tonight.  Seeing was only average, but I took two sets of 14 thirty second videos of the moon using the ASI183MC camera at the f/11 focus of my C14.  An exposure of 0.77 msec was used to take the videos and 280 frames were in each video.  They were processed using Autostakkert 3, keeping the best 15% of the frames.  The resulting stacks were sharpened with wavelets using Registax 6 and composed into a mosaic using Photoshop Elements.  Finally, 4 different images of progressivly brighter levels were saved out and converted into an HDR image with Photomatix Essentials.  The image displayed above was obtained from the second set of videos taken against the last part of twilight.  Click on the image to expand it to full screen.  The clipping from the region around Theophilus, Cyrillus and Catharina below shows that reasonably good resolution was obtained in spite of the seeing.  Also, see the region around the craters Aristoteles and Eudoxus.