Contains:  Solar system body or event
Moon 2020-04-10: First attempt at "mineral moon" mosaic, Darren (DMach)

Moon 2020-04-10: First attempt at "mineral moon" mosaic

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging
Moon 2020-04-10: First attempt at "mineral moon" mosaic, Darren (DMach)

Moon 2020-04-10: First attempt at "mineral moon" mosaic

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

I went outside the evening of 10th April to simply do some observing for a change - I was interested in how much of Omega Centauri I could see using the C11 despite the heavily light-polluted skies here. (Answer: not much.)

The waxing "supermoon" didn't help much, so as retribution I decided to image it. ;)

The objective was to create a mosaic and try my hand at processing a "mineral moon". I ditched my usual ASI290MC for this job, instead opting for the ASI296MC (and with no barlow).

Every previous time I have attempted a full lunar mosaic, some form of clouds rolled in to spoil the party ... and unfortunately, this was no exception. One of these days I'll get a completely clear run at it I'm sure lol.

The mosaic consists of 8 separate panels/captures, with each panel being a stack of 975 frames on average (20% stack). Microsoft ICE was used to stitch the mosaic image together.

An exposure time of 10ms was used, but it should be noted that the ASI294MC is of course not capable of capturing 100 fps at full frame. The effective fps was around 16, with each capture lasting 300 seconds to ensure sufficient frames were captured.

Due to the variable transparency, the luminance and colour balance varied significantly for some of the captures - a huge call-out to some of my planetary imaging "colleagues" (Steve, BQ and Tom) over on Cloudy Nights for their advice on how to make the best of that hodgepodge!

I used several round of "soft light colour boost" to bring out the mineral colours. I much prefer the subtle colour boost in examples I have seen previously, so I tried to resist the temptation to go overboard.

Even so, the colour in rev B may appear slightly strong, depending on the device you're using to view this image (e.g. my tablet versus my phone and laptop). If so, rev A may more accurately represent the result I was going for.

See if you can figure out when the clouds started rolling in, followed by increasingly hazy skies. ;)

Comments

Revisions

  • Moon 2020-04-10: First attempt at "mineral moon" mosaic, Darren (DMach)
    Original
  • Moon 2020-04-10: First attempt at "mineral moon" mosaic, Darren (DMach)
    B
  • Moon 2020-04-10: First attempt at "mineral moon" mosaic, Darren (DMach)
    C
  • Final
    Moon 2020-04-10: First attempt at "mineral moon" mosaic, Darren (DMach)
    E

B

Description: Slight additional colour boost

Uploaded: ...

C

Description: Non-colour boosted image (for comparison)

Uploaded: ...

E

Description: Contrast tweak

Uploaded: ...

Histogram

Moon 2020-04-10: First attempt at "mineral moon" mosaic, Darren (DMach)