Vallis Rheita in colour (Niall MacNeill)

Vallis Rheita in colour

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

I haven’t done the Moon for a while and last night I came out to Wattle Flat with a view to imaging the planets in the morning, which were clouded out later on. However, when I arrived around midnight, the Moon was well placed and although almost full, it was waning, so the terminator on the east side showed some of the craters near the limb in relief. The Moon's age was 17d 18.5 hours and it was 92% illuminated.
Imaging with my new camera the ZWO ASI 178MM, at Prime Focus, I captured 8000MB of data for each of the RGB colour channels. I used a 13 ms exposure per frame and with frame rates around 5 fps I was able to get ~ 1300 frames. I stacked about 1/3rd of these.
The image, which I inverted, is now North up. The seeing was good and it is a colour image, so the resolution is excellent at probably around 700m. The shorter wavelengths limit diffraction effects.
The valley, running diagonally in the centre of the image, is Vallis Rheita and above it in the image is the crater Rheita. To its north (higher right in the image is the beautiful elongated crater Rheita E, which looks a bit like an exclamation mark. The large crater south of the valley (below) is Metius which is 88 kms in diameter and below that Fabricius (78kms). Fabricius has multiple central peaks that rise to 0.8 km, with a rugged rise to the northwest running north–south. I love the look of its cliffs. Running into the bottom of crater Fabricius is the wonderful rille Rimae Janssen.

Original
Final
B

B

Description: I noticed that some of the areas at the boundary of the image and along the terminator were not as sharp as the centre of the image. This was also noticed by Riedl Rudolph. I went back to learn why. I suspected it was due to the alignment boxes in Autostakkert 3! and I was right. I wasn't aware that the align boxes have to cover the entirety of the surface being stacked or the result in those areas is substandard. There is a minimum brightness setting, which if not set low enough means that some of the darker areas receive no alignment box, when this is done automatically. I went back and rectified this by lowering the minimum darkness setting and where necessary adding alignment boxes manually.
Whilst I was reworking I decide to try the sharpened IR 642nm BP image as a Luminosity layer. This greatly improved the sharpness, without adding artefacts or noise.

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