The Moon from the 22nd June

A bit late, but I'm just not getting time to get updated at the moment. Ho Hum. Anyway, on the 22nd June, I had a chance to have a go at another mosaic.

I got the kit out, and with a polar align done by pointing a compass and roughly making the polar axis lie in the track of the needle (a deeply accurate method I don't think). I connected all together and checked the views. The moon was very low (about 14 degrees) and that introduced it's own set of problems (the moon looked like it was under fast flowing running water). Still... having got setup I thought I might as well capture some frames with the C80ED, QHY5v, and I used my 2x barlow to get in a bit closer.

I set out to capture a mosaic using the 12-10 bit companding mode... this produces more detail but at the expense of a much reduce dynamic range... I'm still undecided on the merits of this mode... as the normal 8bit mode I can drive at higher frame rates.

Anyway... this is a 25 pane mosaic, each pane is 250 of 1000 frames, stacked and wavelets in Registax 5.1, merged in ICE. There were some exposure variations that cause some serious problems using the usual manual merge process with iMerge thanks to the changing sky conditions as the sun set.



Click for full size.

I then put some tubes between the barlow and camera, refocused and had a play at higher magnification. A complete nuts idea given the altitude of the moon, but hey... I was there, the kit was there, the moon was there... so why not...

Anyway.. Each of these is 250 of 1000 frames. I used the ROI settings of the capture software to get a higher frame rate also.

Herschel



Sinus Iridium (Bay of Rainbows)



Clavius



Gassendi



And finally, one a little more recent, a shot of the moon, rising out of the trees