First of 3 videos of the moon captured towards the end of February, 2018. Poor conditions, but I was just testing a rather long 6 inch, F/8 Newtonian on the Atlas EQ-G mount. Pretty shaky rig, but usable for moon and planetary imaging.
The moon still appears full and tonight (Sunday, Dec 3, 2017) is supposed to be the night when it is actually at its largest and closest to Earth at perigee.
It looked bigger to me the night before, but I guess that was because the weather was better. 🙂 To find out, I made an animated GIF that compares the 4 days worth of images:
It does look like the 4th moon is bigger than the others! So, it was worth it to re-setup the scope and get the shot. Lucky for me the sky cleared long enough to do it. Later that evening, the clouds arrived in force and it hasn’t been clear since.
The full “Supermoon” of Dec, 2017 taken on the night of the 2nd at about 11:30 PM local time (Dec 3, 2017, 05:30 UT.) Not too bad seeing and just a few high clouds that I had to wait out.
I have another version from data earlier in the evening. At about 7:30 PM CST, the moon was high enough to shoot. I shot 2 AVI’s with 200 frames each and processed those in IRIS:
On Thursday, November 30, 2017 I tried my luck with “lucky imaging” of the moon. I set the capture to 100 frames each and took top, middle and bottom images of a waxing moon a few days from full.
I ended up using only the top and bottom panels since there was enough overlap with the TV-85 and the Toupcam IMX224 camera in those two panels. Each panel is the best 50 frames.
After a basic levels adjustment for all layers , I used the wavelets filter in the Astra Image Photoshop plug-in to do an initial sharpening of the merged image and then a SmartSharpen filter to finish it off. No other processing was done to the image beyond the above.
Update: Friday, Dec 1, 2017 moon image with the same setup as the above.
