Shooting the Moon

A couple of shots of the moon in gaps in the clouds from the previous nights.





A clear night yesterday, and the Moon was nearly full. I got out and grabbed a shot with the camera and 55-250 lens handheld earlier on



I got the scope out later, levelled, powered up and aligned on the moon, then on to use the webcam to try and capture the lunar surface closer up. I had a real headache getting everything setup. I couldn't remember the tubing required on the focusser to allow me to get focus, I couldn't get the right settings in wxastrocapture to enable to get a reasonable preview on screen. After about 50 minutes of faffing I managed to get the right combination of tubes and settings and there she was on screen. Phew.

Then onto focussing. Well, that was another major headache. Whilst the drawtube no longer moves up and down (there's still a little play visible when using the 5x barlow, but not enough to be a problem) there's no fine tuning and getting precise focus is tough, add in poor conditions and it was horrible. After yet more faffing I finally got it as close as I was going to, and started capturing.

I ran off a bunch of avi's. Firstly at 800mm on Aristarchus, then at 400mm to capture four sets (although it ended up being 5 due to drift) and compose as a mosaic, then a final 800mm on the terminator.

Time passed whilst all this capturing was going on. I then swapped out the webcam for the 450d, using the OM mount 2xTC to get some image scale, and the 10x preview on liveview. Focusing was really hard thanks to the conditions, I've had it much easier to focus the moon before in this config. Anyway, here's the not great result



I started trying to process the AVI's this morning, and followed my previous routine for processing them. Went through, clicked on the option to debayer (RAW modded webcam) and the picture on screen turned to mush. It didn't matter what options I tried it did the same thing. I then tried aviraw to convert and that showed exactly the same symptoms. I stacked the image anyway, using single point, I still can't get multipoint to produce anything other than broken segments, and adjusted in wavelets. The image still shows the Bayer matrix pattern across it, but it did work.



I ended up comparing my old config to the new one, and found that the capture format was set to RGB24 on the new machine and YUV420 on the old. I reckon this is the problem. I don't know if all the AVI's are wasted or whether I can find something that will debayer them for me, but the hunt is on.