Our neighbour in space, the Moon’s craters and “seas” (dried lava plains) show up well when using a telescope.
I wasn’t planning on imaging the Moon — after all, my kit is designed for large deep sky objects. I was actually gathering data on the Orion Nebula but noticed that it was about to move behind the chimney on my house. Plus it was a very crisp, clear night, and I didn’t want to waste a moment of it. I’d already clocked that the Moon was high in the sky because it was essentially a bright light making my imaging of the Orion Nebula all the trickier. Why not try to image the Moon until my main target is visible again?
Lunar / planetary imaging is quite different from deep sky. I’d dabbled in some a few years back so remembered the basics. Instead of taking long sub-exposures, you take a video and then splice out the frames, taking the best ones — when the atmosphere was steady — and stacking them together. This technique is sometimes called “lucky imaging”.
Fortunately the ASIAIR PRO’s user interface was simple enough that I worked out how to take the video there and then. The resulting video was about three minutes long. I ran it through AutoStakkert!3 and then put the best 500 frames into RegiStax 6 to tweak the wavelets. Then into Lightroom and Photoshop for more tweaks and hey presto, we have a photo of the Moon!
Interesting note: I had my Optolong L-eXtreme filter in because I was imaging the Orion Nebula, and didn’t want the faff of removing and reinstalling it, so just left it in when taking the Moon video. The Moon is bright enough that this wasn’t a problem.
* January 2021
* Bristol, UK (Bortle 8)
* Telescope: Askar FRA400 f/5.6 Quintuplet APO Astrograph
* Camera: ZWO ASI 2600MC-PRO
* Filter: Optolong L-eXtreme
* Mount: Orion Sirius EQ-G
* Control: ASIAIR PRO
* Software: AutoStakkert!3, RegiStax 6, Lightroom, Photoshop
* 500 frames
By Lee Pullen
Example source data
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