The moon already passed culmination and the air was trembling as if scared of me, possibly because I removed my face mask for the solo session. Nevertheless, I captured a few images with the new ASI462MC which is said to sport high NIR response. It was the first lunar imaging opportunity this month.

Since reflectors have the ability to focus visible and NIR light in the same plane I made a few images without any filter benefitting from short exposure times and low gain, though I feel that an IR-cut filter provides crisper and clearer images.

A sequence of the same region around crater Clavius was taken with various filters in order to get a feeling about the effect of filters, IR-cut, IR742nm, IR850nm, Quad Band and no filter. This time, I did not care about color balance. It may be best to convert NIR images to grayscale. With poor seeing conditions, also attested by Autostakkert's quality graph, the tests may not be representative or fair, but merely a first impression. With IR-pass filters the camera's response is notably high. Often clouds interfered causing long breaks and in no time the moon descended below 30° rendering any further attempts meaningless.

All images are 8-bit raw stacks of 200 'best' frames out of 2000 and 1.5x drizzled. The used telescope is a 6-inch Newtonian with a 2x barlow = FL1500mm at F10. According to SharpCap, the sensor temperature was 39.6°C yet I saw no need for applying any noise reduction!

I noticed that stacking in Autostakkert3 with align points (size 48 checked) as multi-scale takes out the PC memory (CPU i7-8 core, 8GB memory, 1920x1080 pixels SER), which is a bit strange although it is a 8-bit raw color SER file. Using Multi-Scale with mono images does not make a great difference. Does anyone have similar experience? Also, does it make sense to check "RGB Align" in Autostakkert3? I can hardly see any difference, neither in the stack nor during processing.