Hello reddit, there is more here: https://www.instagram.com/astronewton/

What an incredibly fun project!

This is my second attempt at a Lunar mosaic using high speed video capture. My previous method has been to simply use my DSLR to capture the entire body at once, which proved to be quicker and definitely fit my inherent laziness typically involved in planetary imaging. However, with the addition of my ZWO ASI224 MC, I now have the capability to realistically image multiple panels within a relatively short time. My first attempt used my ASI 120MC, a USB 2.0 camera, which suffered from reduced resolution as well as the fact that despite peppering captures over the entire Moon, I somehow still missed a small patched which had to be fixed with some DSLR data which I took on the same night.

This image consists of 55 panels, all consisting of 60-second video captures of ~3820 frames. After capture, these were stacked using 20% frames by quantity as well as the top 50% frames by quality using 3X drizzle. Both mosaics, made in Microsoft ICE, were averaged for maximized noise reduction, and luminance was extracted for separate imaging.

Luminance:

- PixInsight Deconvolution using an artificial PSF, which largely sharpened the image

- A few passes of Unsharp mask in small pixel values (Decon did most the work really)

- 2 passes of ACDNR for Noise Reduction

- One more small pass of Deconvolution

- Curves edits for Contrast

Color:

- Noise analysis in PixInsight found G channel to be the least noisy

- Ran Linear Fit process in PI to match R and B to G channel

- Several small increases in Saturation using Curves Transformation

- Several more increasing and decreasing curves for Saturation while using a Luminance mask to keep the bright areas from getting too colorful while still allowing Mare areas to pick up the beautiful orange and blue hues

Combined:

- Split channels of Color image, used PixInsight LGRB process to combine color and luminance image

- Final curves adjustments completed in Photoshop to reduce background brightness (northern hemisphere background picked up a slight glow due to passing clouds)

- Resized to 75% (so original is about 15,000 pixels north to south)

I am not completely done with this project - such an extreme amount of detail has driven me to begin a project of studying the lunar surface so I can begin labeling, well, basically everything I can find. I've seen craters and rilles and mountains on this image I've never glimpsed before, so I am now seeking out detailed Lunar Atlases in order to add labels to every corner of this picture. This will understandably take a while, but should be fun. And by fun, I mean it should pass the time until Kansas gets its atmospheric crap together and allows me to get back to Deep Sky Imaging for the first time since April.

Still, I can see room for improvement. Autostakkert!3 has proven to be unreliable as far as aligning color channels - my Color NR was enough to remove color aberration, but when comparing channels separately I noticed a definite alignment discrepancy. I have also noticed a similar issue when stacking solar images. My next attempt will likely use AS!2 as it has proven to be reliable in the past.