Second go at webcam on the moon

I had to pop out early evening and drop some things around to a friend. Whilst there, I had a quick go with their telescope. It's a very small scope, not sure where it came from. It appears to be a 50mm Frac with an FL of about 350mm. Getting any magnification is just not going to happen, with the supplied 9mm ep, it's getting about 39x, so it's probably pretty good for the brighter large clusters, M44 and M45 spring to mind, but at about 9pm last night, the moon was the only real target. oh, it's got a 0.96 (??) focuser and ep's, so just using some ordinary plossls aren't going to work. I had a look t the moon, and the view was pretty good. I couldn't detect any CA, but that may be due to lack of magnification, or going blind looking at the bright moon. The entire moon fitted in the FOV, but having said that you could make out a fair amount of surface detail, Theophilus, Cyrillus and Catharina for example were obvious and clear.

I had other things to do, so I left them to it and headed off.

After way too many things needing to be done, it was quite late by the time I got my gear out and the Moon was heading lower towards the west. I did a quick setup, level and align on the moon, dropped in the webcam with both barlows and had a little play. Having taken a look, I ended up just going for the webcam without the barlows and took 2 avi's of nearly 3000 frames each, one of the top half, the other the bottom, or should that be the other way around... hmm.

A small note, whilst the much that has been in the sky for the previous few nights wasn't there, the seeing was pretty poor. As I watched on the lappie, the moon seemed to swim and dance before my eyes.

Anyway, after capturing the AVI's I went to work on processing them. After running them both through registax, for some reason the first one stacked over 2000 frames, and the second one only 80, but never mind. I applied the same wavelets set, reminder to self, if doing another mosaic, save the wavelets setting after the first process. Luckily, I'd followed some advice from someone on Astrochat and used the Imageinfo button, so at least I had the details somewhere. Anyway, here's the resulting images :

Stack 1


Stack 2


Having done these two, I made a small crop to remove the odd lines in the middle, then I used imerge to combine them and create a mosaic of the moon.



I didn't get to do any visual observing, which I did miss, but given the time scales, and the capturing only took 20 minutes I'm pleased I did setup and do this. It was also rather pleasant to be sat outside in a jumper without freezing to death at nearly midnight.