Moon through filters - 20210518 - Evoguide ED50 at F8.5 (altazastro)

Moon through filters - 20210518 - Evoguide ED50 at F8.5

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

On a night of bad seeing I took the opportunity to document the way the moon reacts to various filters and hence how it reflects at a given range of wavelengths.

I used the small Evoguide ED50 with the Barlow group of a Meade 140 barlow lens to achieve F8.5 (425mm).

I then took about 2000 frames each with an IR CUT filter (L), Red filter (R), Green filter (G), Blue filter (B) and IR PASS filter (IR), afterward I processed them with Autostakkert3 keeping the 25% best frames, except for the B ones, where I have to limit the stack to 5%, further proof of the dependence of seeing on wavelength (with the IR PASS I could have kept 75% of the stack, but I decided to limit it to 25%).

You can have a look at the final (stacked) images obtained with each filter and try to spot the differences!

Finally I tried to get a LRGB composite and only then realized how it is difficult to obtain such a composite image of the Moon: from my googling it looks like Winjupos is the software of choice for this task, but it is a bit cumbersome to use and the result I got after repeated trials quite shoddy.

Then I tried a manual alignment with StarTools, but the result leaves much to be desired in this case too.

Part of the problem is that I do not have a filter wheel, so I had to unscrew the camera, change the filter and put it back in the scope: unavoidably the LRGB images where not aligned and I found no software that could correct that easily.

So basically my LRGB images are poor because they are misaligned.

In the future I will try the more promising (in terms of simplicity) L+OSC technique.

B

Description: RED filter - 508 frames

Uploaded: ...

C

Description: GREEN filter - 509 frames

Uploaded: ...

D

Description: BLUE filter - 101 frames

Uploaded: ...

E

Description: IR PASS filter (642-842nm) - 505 frames

Uploaded: ...

G

Description: LRGB composite obtained with StarTools

Uploaded: ...

	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape

	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
Promotions by Submitters When 3 distinct Submitters promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for Top Pick status. This requirement, in addition to anonymization of images and distribution to only a subset of them, prevents biases and ensures that the best images are selected.
Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

Status	n/a
Started	n/a
Astrometry.net job	n/a
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

Image Index:

Contribution Index (beta):