The Moon’s Phases

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June 23 – July 7, 2012 – Full Moon – Astronomy Magazine Picture of the Day, October 5, 2012

I’m really enjoying shooting the different phases of this lunation (a cycle of the moon).  I took the attached shots between June 23 and July 7, 2012.  The full moon image from July 3 was taken when the Moon was about 10 hours past the moment of being full.  You can already see the upper right part of the disk beginning to fall into shadow.

Tekkies:
Celestron NexImage 5 with Gain=4, exposure = 1/500th sec., 24-bit RGB, full frame, unbinned.
Stellarvue 80 mm refractor operating @ f/4.8.
EQ-6 mount, rough polar alignment, no guiding
Shot from my driveway, just north of Guelph, ON.
Clear, poor transparency, average seeing

For each image about 1000 frames were captured in an AVI video file.  Registax was used to align the frames, identify and stack the best 20 frames, and do initial processing (align colour planes, colour balance, wavelets). PixInsight was then used for the following steps (all masked):  deconvolution, ACDNR to remove fine scale noise and a slight curve to increase contrast in the middtones.  Image scale for this camera and telescope combination is 0.95 arcsec per pixel.