Moon 6th May 2006

I took another stab at the Moon last night hoping to build on our discussions here yesterday. This time, I removed the focal reducer to allow the capture of finer detail. To do this, I took 11 images in a mosaic pattern and combined them in Photoshop. I then held off on the processing until this morning when my eyes might be better able to judge image brightness. I increased the brightness along the terminator to show up detail along this region better.
At the same time though, I'm trying to be careful and not overprocess the image. Did I strike the right balance??

As always, I do appreciate constructive cirtitism.



Clrear skies,

Again Mike, the terminator detail is fabulous.

Wasn't the moon great last night!
Thats an excellent image, seems like you have the focus alot sharper, or was the seeing better?
Was each of those 11 a single image or were they each a result of stacking in registax?

I operated the scope at f/10 this time instead of f/6.3. This allowed the camera to pick up smaller detail.
The 11 images overlapped with each other. I couldn't fit the entire moon on the 300d chip at f/10.

Likewise, I can only fit about half the moon on the 300D sensor at F10.
You should compare this to previous images for libration effects.
I'm flicking back and forth between this and your previous image on the 6th trying to see if any libration effects are visible, I "THINK" there is a tiny and I do mean tiny extra amount visible on the image from the 6th, what do you think???

Love it- you really get the sense that the moon is three dimensional in this shot. Detail is fantastically sharp! Amazing how much contrast there actually is in moon considering what we see with the naked eye.