Contains:  Solar system body or event
Getting lucky: Capturing the Moon occulting Messier 23! (Revised), Steve Rosenow

Getting lucky: Capturing the Moon occulting Messier 23! (Revised)

Getting lucky: Capturing the Moon occulting Messier 23! (Revised), Steve Rosenow

Getting lucky: Capturing the Moon occulting Messier 23! (Revised)

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Description

Some of you might remember this one I took about two weeks ago - a ten-frame HDR composite of the moon occulting open star cluster Messier 23.

I've reprocessed this and eliminated much of the glare, although I did keep some to keep the photo somewhat natural looking. In the process of doing so, I also painstakingly selected each star by hand, copied them to a new layer, and enhanced their visibility to increase the contrast and enhance the overall scene.

I think this one looks a lot better.

Technical details:

Nikon D5100

Meade DS2090 OTA

1/400

1/40

1/10

1/2

1 second

2 seconds

6 seconds

8 seconds

15 seconds

20 seconds

For this time around, preliminary adjustments to each layer were made in Adobe Lightroom 5.5, then merged with the Lightroom plugin LR Enfuse. Output from that was taken into Adobe Photoshop 6, where final adjustments and two High Pass filter layers applied. After that, a painstaking process of selecting each star by hand was performed, copied and pasted to their own layer and adjusted for stellar magnitude (brightness) and better visibility.

I then took it back into Lightroom for two final tweaks to the clarity and a final hightlights/shadows enhancement.

I hope you enjoy!

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Getting lucky: Capturing the Moon occulting Messier 23! (Revised), Steve Rosenow