This area of the moon includes Mare Imbrium and the three main craters Plato, at the top right, Archimedes, in the lower center and Copernicus on the left below center .  Also visible, coming out of the shadows from the right, is a section of the Apennines Mountains.  Near the end of the Apennines is Eratosthenes, a crater about half the size of Copernicus that has a prominent central peak.

Another moon mosaic for the month of October.  Since the weather was so clear on this early October morning, I decided to do some more planetary-style imaging with my new planetary/guider cam.   Decent seeing and as already mentioned, very transparent skies.   It was a little chilly, but not too bad when wearing two coats.    🙂

I stitched this together with a little over two dozen, 1280×960 pixel images taken with my eyepiece planetary/guider cam and a 6″ dobsonian.  Reasonably good seeing this night.   When I saw that the stars were barely twinkling, I figured I better get some images while the getting was good.

I let the camera take an image every two seconds while I moved the scope from bottom to top of the target and let it drift across the field of view.  In all, I got about 334 images in RAW FIT format files, which I converted in IRIS.   I had to debayer them to get color and they came out really red, since I don’t have that specific camera in IRIS.   A Nikon seemed to be the closest match as far as conversion from RAW to RGB color.  IRIS  was able to apply the same color correction settings to each image in a batch mode and then I selected and manually exported select images into PSD format for PS.

It is not the best stitch-up job, since the moon rotated somewhat in the field of view between the first images and the last.  But, I think it is reasonably good for a few days worth of work.  I had to patch a few goofs and bad spots after the original posting.  One major one I didn’t catch until a few days after posting was the original image was backwards!    It seems the camera outputs mirror images in RAW format or it was possibly the FIT file format was encoded backwards.  I’m not sure.   I still have the RAW data, so I can put together another mosaic if I get bored one day.   🙂

A new camera was used to take these new images of the moon.   A six inch Newtonian on a Dobsonian mount was used, so there was no tracking.   The camera used was an Aptina-based, AR0130 1.2Mp sensor eyepiece cam.   It has good low-light capability and a wide exposure range.

I hope to use it as a guide camera on a tracking mount and do double duty as a planetary/moon camera when hooked to one of my bigger scopes.  I can also use it to take some deep sky images with various other lenses or smaller scopes.  With the right scope, these types of cameras work great for small objects like planetary nebulae and small galaxies.

I took this shot on the morning of September 25, 2016.  I was trying out my new Smartphone Digiscoping Adapter, which is a mount for most kinds of camera phones to a telescope.

The adapter was hooked to a 6″ F/8 Dobsonian with a 25mm Plossl eyepiece.  This device just clamps onto the barrel of any eyepiece and gets the lens of the camera phone centered right over the Continue reading Crescent Moon, Sep 25, 2016 →

This is an afocal eyepiece projection image using a 25mm Plossl eyepiece, a 6 inch F/8 Newtonian and a HTC 3.2 megapixel camera phone.   The first image was sharpened in IRIS, then exported into PS and sharpened/enhanced some more.  The second image is maxed out sharpening, slightly overdone, perhaps.  lol