Two-panel mosaic of crater Moretus in the southern highlands of the moon. The rectangular shadow on the mountain rising from the southern limb near the top edge of the image seem to be quite artifical. First, I suspected a stacking error of AS!3 near the lunar limb. However, it is already visible in the recorded SER movie. Therefore, it seems to be just a weird blend of a shadow and sky background.

The data was captured on the morning of Sep 6th 2023 in Northern Germany. According to the star test using Capella before the planetary and lunar imaging session, I think the seeing was fair-good (~ 6-7 on the Pickering Scale). Processing of the IR/G data is based on the tutorials Processing Lunar images with Photoshop by Damian Peach and Imaging the Moon: Capture and Process, Stack, Sharpen by Refreshing Views.

If you want to process the data yourself, I uploaded the raw stack straight out of AS!3 here.

06.09.2023 (04:33 UT - 04:35 UT)

Celestron C14 Edge HD @ f=6650 mm (F/28), res = 0.09"/px
+ Celestron CGE Pro mount
+ Celestron EF
+ ZWO ASI 290 MM
+ Baader 2x VIP Barlow
+ ZWO EFW
+ Baader IR (685 nm) filter
+ Tempest Cooler
+ Omegon Dew Heater
+ Astrozap Dew Shield for C 14

Very short imaging train: I simply screwed the Baader VIP Barlow into the nose piece of the ZWO EFW. However, the small pixel size of the ZWO ASI 290 MM leads to a pixel scale of 0.09"/px at a reasonable f-ratio of f/28.

IR: 5000 frame  SER movie
1x1 bin

recorded with Firecapture

Moon 59° above the horizon
Seeing: Pickering 6-7 (fair - good)

Postprocessing

IR

Autostakkert!3:
- Stacking 500 of 5000 frames
- Image Stabilization: Surface, Improved Tracking, Cropped
- Quality Estimator: Laplace, Noise Robust 5, Local
- Reference Frame: Autosize
- Minimum AP size = 104, Min Bright = 20, Multi-Scale

Registax:
- histogram correction to increase the brightness of the underexposed image
- wavelet sharpening using Wavelet filter Gaussian, step increment = 0, no linked wavelets:
layer 2 - 100, denoise & sharpen

Photoshop CS2:
- image crop
- level corrections to clip the black levels of the shadows
- unsharp mask (amount: 21%, radius: 1.9 px)
- sharpen
- slight noise reduction

PTGui:
- creation of 2-panel mosaic

Schwentinental (Germany)

-CS Daniel