A Daytime Moon

This morning while waiting for my son’s school bus we noticed the moon was high in the sky and very pretty. I had a few minutes to kill after he went off to school and before I had to start working so I quickly pulled out the telescope.

Lunar images are always somewhat challenging for me because I can’t fit the whole moon within my field of view, I’m too zoomed in. To fix this I take multiple videos and then hope I can successfully photo stitch them together later.

This time I ended up with 16 videos, each a few hundred frames. Each video was stacked in AutoStakkert, then each image was given the same wavelet sharpening settings in Registax. I performed some contrast adjustments in DarkTable so that the photo stitching had some extra detail to work with. Finally I performed the photo stitch in windows photo gallery.

The stacking and stitching left A LOT of artifacts that I had to clean up manually, some ugly horizontal lines, and the background sky was a mess. But after some time in photo editing software I think I’ve brought the image back to life a bit.

This was all taken with my 10” dobsonian telescope and ZWO ASI290MC planetary camera. I put the frame rate down to about half a millisecond and picked a gain that looked good to my eye. I focused by eye, it was daytime, I had nothing else to focus on anyway! I set my output to SER video files, which AutoStakkert can natively process.

I love this image but it was a lot of work to get from start to finish! The photo stitching software even had a few funny screw ups along the way!