Posts tagged 'Moon'

Observing Report 20th-21st July 2019 (Fifty years on)

Posted by on July 22nd 2019 in Astrostuff, Observing Reports
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At 02:56:15 UTC on July 21st 1969 Armstrong became the first person to step onto the Moon.

It seemed fitting to get an image of the Moon at 02:56:15 UTC on July 21st 2019.

 

 

It's not the best lunar image I've ever made, but I was trying out a recently-acquired second-hand camera with a recently-acquired second-hand PC and a recently-acquired new SSD. Being able to record full-frame (1936 x 1216 px) raw .avi files at 160 FPS with no skipped frames and no write-lag is a real improvement which should be useful for capturing ISS Transits:

 

Observing Report 16th-17th October 2016 (coloured Moon mosaic)

Posted by on October 20th 2016 in Astrostuff, Observing Reports
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Moon-gazing again last Sunday... playing around with a colour video camera on the 6" R-C... 17 clips each of 250 frames, stacked with AutoStakkert!2, coaxed into one mosaic using iMerge (see previous post), tarted up with Photoshop CS3.

The result is better than expected.

Feel free to click on it to see the full version, but be aware that it might take a while to load - it's about 12Mb:

 

If that's not enough, there's a ~40Mb .bmp version here.

One edge done

Posted by on October 19th 2016 in Astrostuff, Observing Reports
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We've now got all of the bits, they're fitting together nicely:

 

Should be finished soon.

Corner piece

Posted by on October 18th 2016 in Astrostuff, Observing Reports
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"The moon is essentially gray, no color; looks like plaster of Paris or sort of a grayish beach sand."
James Lovell, Apollo 8, first transmission from first lunar orbit, 24 December 1968.

 

More of the jigsaw should follow soon.

(Late) Observing Report 13th-14th March 2014 (Another Moon Mosaic)

Posted by on March 25th 2014 in Astrostuff, Observing Reports, Pics
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There's not much to report here, no stargazing was done - poor seeing and too much haze for visual observing of faint and/or fuzzy targets. The Moon was about the only thing worth pointing the scope at. Suffice to say that 26 slightly hazy .avi files were taken, stacked, trimmed and stitched to make this image:

Moon (13/03/2014 @ 22:00 approx). 26 panes stitched with iMerge. Each pane is ~300/~3000 stacked frames. DMK mono CCD camera on the GSRC6M.

(Late) Observing Report 26th-27th August 2013 (Another Moon Mosaic)

Posted by on September 15th 2013 in Astrostuff, Observing Reports, Pics
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It was going to be a night for software-testing, there having been a new release of APT that needed checking out. The skies were clear but the heat of the previous day was still making its escape from the planet via the air, which meant that the seeing was marginal for any sort of imaging, therefore I wasn't intending to take any images.

And then I remembered the medium-bandwidth Hydrogen-alpha (H-a) filter that I'd bought on the cheap. In theory it would cut out the worst of the shimmer. It had to be tried.

It worked, and it worked better than I would have expected. I grabbed 22 .avi files of the Moon, and after a bit of stacking jiggery-pokery I stuck the resultant .bmps into PS's photomerge. That spat out a reasonably-good mosaic image which I processed with RegiStax, and the following image was the result. I'm reasonably happy with it, but there's room for improvement next time out:

Moon (27/08/2013 @ 02:00 approx). 22 panes stitched with PS CS3.
Each pane is 200/2000 stacked frames. DMK mono CCD camera with H-a filter on the GSRC6M.
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