Lunar Eclipse Jan 31, 2018
Category Archives: Moon
Another Supermoon?
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 Supermoon of Dec 2, 2017
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:
Two Panel Moon Mosaic
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.
The Moon on Oct 23, 2017
The moon was low and setting in the west when I took this shot. Earth-shine was very pretty and I tried to capture how it looked, but the bright part always gets over-exposed. But, you get the idea. 🙂
The Moon on April 4, 2017
The Full Moon of Feb 9, 2017
This is six frames taken at 1/800 sec @ ISO 100 using the TV-85/Canon T3 combo. I did an offset removal on each frame in IRIS and then median stacked them. One round of sharpening and wavelets in IRIS, too, but that was it. Contrast adjustment in PS and then posted here.
First Quarter Moon, Feb 3, 2017
Moon, Venus and Mars Conjunction, Jan 31, 2017
A beautiful conjunction of the moon and two planets made the last evening of Jan 2017 quite nice. The Moon joined Venus and Mars on this evening and I just had to get some shots.
I could have used a tripod for these, but I took the images by propping the camera on the top of a car. Consequently, I had lots of rejected images due to motion blur. But, luckily, I got a three steady ones that were good enough to post. The forth image below was a repair job, but it came out OK after correcting it for my unsteady hands. 🙂
These last two are actually composites. The one right above had motion blur and as mentioned previously, I was able to fix it. But, fixing it messed up the trees. So, I had to composite the good trees back in from the original. In the second image above, the moon was replaced with a better version from the 200mm lens.
Two Day Old Moon – HDR
On Jan 29, 2017, a two day old moon was in the sky and I shot it first thing before it sank too low to image. This is somewhat of an HDR image in that I took a series of 4 exposures, long to short, to try and get the earthshine and details in the crescent. I aligned and stacked them in PS with about a 50% blend for each exposure.