Between the daytime job and the late afternoon “home improvements” (that is mounting windows and other stuff), plus the new 14″ Newtonian telescope ongoing modifications, I found some time to finally process one my best lunar mosaics acquired using the 115mm APO refractor.
The frames that make the mosaic were acquired on the cold and foggy night of November 2, under very good seeing conditions. That night I’ve asked my wife to accompany me at an initially short observing run to test some RGB imaging with the refractor, but after the first acquired images I’ve realized that it would be a good moment for a large lunar mosaic.
The following is a 40-image mosaic (resized to 80%), each a 600 out of 1000 frames stack. The seeing was around 7-8/10 so some of the smallest details detectable are close to the theoretical limit of the aperture used. Such details are: some small craterlets on the floor of Plato (not only the four larger ones!), the rima inside Vallis Alpes (which is rather difficult actually) and some other small craters on the floor of Clavius. Also notice the multitude of domes near the terminator in the Copernicus area.
But, since I’ve wanted to test the RGB filter set on the Moon, I had to do some mosaics for each of the color channels. This time I’ve stacked around 500 frames for each of the 6 images that make out a single mosaic corresponding for each of the three color channels.
The total processing time for the following image was around 10 hours, which included the stacking process, the processing of each of the images that make up the mosaics (both the “luminance” and RGB mosaics), processing the background (this actually takes a lot of patience), color saturation and overlaying of the colors onto the black-and-white larger image. It was a painstaking job but the end result looks good even by my standards (which are usually quite high in order to achieve better processing results). Of course there are some small retouches that I could have done, but this mosaic will not get any more attention from my part.
Hope it will do get some attention from anyone reading this post…
Max
(November 10, 2014)
maximus photography 
super foto!! felicitari pentru articole si pasiunea pentru acest domeniu.
Multumesc pentru comentariu si pentru vizualizarea fotografiilor, Sorana!
Am descarcat Clavius_area_w.two_cameras din postarea anterioara si Large_moon_mosaic_bw, am adus craterele la aceeasi dimensiune, o imagine langa cealalta si le-am analizat indelung; revoltator de mica diferenta intre C11 si TS115APO. Citisem undeva ca un refractor bun de 4″ “face” cam cat (aproape ca) un CS de 8″ si mi se parea cam exagerat! Si Clavius_area_w … a fost clar favorizat de iluminare! Interesant!