Tonights Moon 5th May

What power eyepiece are you using for these? And even if you think your compressed jpeg has lost some detail, the rest of us can't tell that!

Seanie, no eypieces at all. The wider fields are at prime focus, and the close up is done with a 2x Barlow. The scope's focal ratio is roughly 6.5. The bright white areas seems to wash out when the image is saved as jpeg. When you look at the original bmp or tiff these areas are crystal clear with plenty of detail. This is understandable when you look at the file sizes - originals being close to or greater than 1MB and the jpeg around 60KB - you've got to lose detail somewhere. I posted in jpeg because that's what the site accepts, it won't accept bmp.

John,
thats an amazing first image, my first were a complete joke compared to that.
You should get your hands on photoshop and work on that image, they look clear and sharp., well done

Looks like I'm goin' to have to get serious all right.
'er indoors is in for a shock when I start spendin' some of the SSIAs. Sod it!!. I'm into this big time, never had so much fun. However, I'm also a tight fisted bast$£d and believe in getting the most out of the minimal equipment - so I'll chugg on in this vein for a while yet, it's the best way to learn anyway. If you get all the toys too easy, you'll never understand 'em and never do your best.
Photoshop though, is something I must buy. I've been messing about with Microsoft Digital Image Pro 10 (got from a neighbour who works for Microsoft) and it's OK for basic sh1t, but not if your serious. Working at prime focus with a webcam means you've got to do a lot of image processing after capture. Registax is great at that, and Wavelet processing does most of the work, once you figure out whats going on, but if you need to do anything else you really need something like Photoshop.

Rather than spending money on Photoshop for the mo, it might be worth downloading a program called Gimp. Should help out a bit until you get Photoshop.

You can download photoshop 30 day free trial and activate it later.

Thanks for the tips guys.
Heres a few of tonights Moon 7th May before the clouds rolled in, not quite as good as previous: