Two-panel mosaic of Rimae Hyginus, Ariadaeus & Triesnecker, located in Mare Vaporum. I captured the same area one year ago under very similar lighting conditions, however with poorer seeing, a slightly different imaging train and larger exposure times of 13 ms instead of 4 ms. Revision B shows a comparisons of both images to demonstrate the improvement in resolution.

Original Sep 6th 2023,  04:22 UT & 04:24 UT
Revision B Comparison of the images from Sep 6th 2023 and Jul 20th 2022

On the morning of Sep 6th 2023, seeing was fair-good (~ 6-7 on the Pickering Scale) according to the star test using Capella before the planetary and lunar imaging session.

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 stacks straight out of AS!3 here.

Equipment

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
+ Baader IR (685 nm) 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.

IR: 5000 frame  SER movie
1x1 bin

recorded with Firecapture

Moon 59° above the horizon
Seeing: Pickering 4-7 (poor - good)

Postprocessing

IR

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

Revision B

PTGUI:
- image alignment

PixInsight:
- adding annotations

PIPP:
- create AnimatedGIF with 0.75 frams/s

Schwentinental (Germany)

-CS Daniel