18 megapixel moon.

March 10th last week was some of the best seeing I've seen yet for imaging the moon. I took a series of 35 captures to build a mosaic. I've spent quite a few hours over the last week stacking and processing each image and then building a mosaic in photoshop. The gear used is an 8" SCT with a ZWO ASO120MM camera. I also used an Astronomik 742 IR-pass filter. Each capture was ~4000 frames with the best 1600 stacked in As!2. Wavelets were applied to the resulting stack in Registax 6 . I used linked wavelets and only applied slight sharpening in the first two layers. The same wavelets were applied to almost all of the stacks, some of the captures that were taken later in the night had slightly poorer seeing, and I used slightly less wavelets on these.
I pasted each finalised stack into photoshop as a layer and matched up the positions, cleaning up the edges of each. I used photoshop levels on each layer to balance brightness and contrast of each image.



full link here: www.astrobin.com/full/84199/
Click view full resolution to see full size.

Like floating over the surface in Apollo, quite amazing.

This photo is the same night as your recent close-up image of Copernicus, right? I can see Plato and those mountains to its south. Great shot!
See you at Cosmos, J McKeon.

Aubrey.

Yep this is the same night, I processed Copernicus first as a test to see how the images would process. Very glad with how they came out. See you at Cosmos.

Stunning piece of work, and thanks for posting your workflow details.
Tony

Thanks!