With a dead guide camera and a full moon cycle, I needed a target that didn't need any guiding and could be done with short exposures.  Sure, my system will go for 5 minutes unguided and I could get a V-curve focusing system to work, but there was the moon...just laughing at me.  So why not?

Unfortunately, the seeing wasn't spectacular--maybe just a bit over 2".  On top of that, I wasn't patient enough to wait for the moon to cross the meridian.  It was probably only at 40-50 degrees altitude so I didn't minimize the air path.  Since I'm not a lunar/planetary guy,  I had to fool around with a number of things to get this to work.  First, the L-series mount doesn't come with a built-in lunar rate.  There's a way to do it but instead I just used the "jog" function to recenter every so often.  The QHY600M doesn't have a square sensor (which I really miss from my former 16803 based cameras) so I had to create a mosaic to get the entire surface.  Since my autofocus system is down, I manually focused on the craters, which is fundamentally a really crummy way to focus but I wasn't trying to win any awards here.  I just wanted to see how it might come out.  So I focused as best I could and took a lot of shots using 15 millisecond exposures through the Lum filter.  Then I simply manually sorted to find a couple of particularly sharp images using the Blink tool in PI.   I think that seeing was the ultimate limiting factor in image sharpness.  It is indeed interesting to see how much distortion and sharpness varies over the field simply due to the atmosphere.  But, you planetary and lunar imaging guys already know that!  I used the Deconvolution tool in PI with a prerecorded 2" PSF and a light pass of MMT for processing and combined the two images in Photoshop.

Now that I have this dialed it, I have a little better idea how I could improve the results the next time, which of course might include using some actual stacking software like Registax.  Adding some color wouldn't be too hard either.  Waiting for better seeing in the range of 1" would really help as well.  Maybe I'll give it a another try during the next lunar cycle.  There is indeed a lot going on on the moon and it's interesting to check it out.

As for my guide camera, it's an interesting story and a replacement is now in Santiago, but I'll save that story for another image.  With the moon waning, I'm hoping that we can have the scope fixed in a week or so.  I'd really like to get back to imaging some fainter objects.

John