The final image from my lunar imaging sessions on the morning of Sep 6th/7th 2023. A 4-panel mosaic of the large craters Ptolemaeus, Alphonsus & Arzachel. Unfortunately, the mosaic is missing an interesting crater chain located NW of Alphonsus, which I captured on Sep 6th (revision B).

Original 4-panel mosaic of Ptolemaeus, Alphonsus & Arzachel (07.09.2023, 04:22 UT)
Revision B Alphonsus IR (06.09.2023, 04:46 UT)

According to the star test using Capella before the planetary and lunar imaging session, I think the seeing was poor-fair (~ 4-5 on the Pickering Scale).

Processing of the IR 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.

07.09.2023 (04:20 UT - 04:25 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
+ Astronomik G filter
+ Baader (685 nm) IR 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.

G: 5000 frame  SER movie
1x1 bin

recorded with Firecapture

Moon 60° above the horizon
Seeing: Pickering 4-5 (poor - fair)

Postprocessing

G

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 4-panel mosaic

Schwentinental (Germany)

-CS Daniel