The Moon, October 12, 2013

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October 12, 2013

Since my main interest in astrophotography is shooting faint fuzzes, I have to work around the moon. When the moon is big and bright — about 2 weeks out of each month — I can’t shoot the faint stuff. So I sometimes shoot the moon instead.

This image was made with my regular deep sky rig.  But I shot only through the red filter, and combined the best 9 of around 120 frames shot through intermittent cloud over a 90 minute period.  Enjoy!

Tekkies:
SBIG STL-11000M camera, Baader LRGB filters, 10″ f/6.8 ASA astrograph, Paramount MX.  No guiding.  Acquisition, calibration, registration and integration all done using Maxim-DL.  All other processing in Registax.  Shot from my SkyShed in Guelph, Ontario. No moon.  Very good seeing and average transparency with a lot of cloud (only 9 of 120 frames were kept).

9x10msec R (total=90ms).

Nine frames were calibrated, aligned and stacked in MaximDL.  Registax was used to boost brightness and contrast, and to apply sharpening and noise reduction to the first and second wavelet layers.  Image scale is about 1.1 arc sec per pixel.