As we all know, viewing the full moon through a telescope reveals a washed out, low contrast object that gives little in the way of surface detail. So to see the details we must view the waxing (or waning) moon along the terminator whereby the casting of shadows reveals all the glorious details. I usually find between the crescent and gibbous moon to be ideal.

Anyway, having taken a handful of close up moon photos, I wondered if any of them had enough overlap to do a small mosaic. Sure enough there were a few I had around Mare Imbrium that made for a nice mosaic. Taking the idea further, I wondered if I could do the same for the whole moon. So over the course of three lunar cycles, I photographed the waxing moon along the terminator on every clear night. For much of it the seeing was very good but occasionally got pretty bad and the resulting images were excluded from the mosaic. Plus I couldn’t practically get really crisp images at illuminations less than the crescent moon due to the low altitude in the early evening.

After that I began the process of aligning and blending the individually processed images using Photoshop CS5 (117 out of 237 processed images were selected to be included in the mosaic). It took a bit of trial and error to find an approach that gave the desired results, particularly since the lunar libration effect complicated the process of aligning the images (mainly around the polar regions).

In the end I managed to get a ~200 megapixel, relatively seamless, mosaic with resolution estimated at a few kilometres between the crescent and gibbous regions. Less so towards the eastern and western regions.

Equipment:

Skywatcher 8” Goto dobsonian, 3x Televue barlow lens, Nikon D7500. ~2000 frame UHD video, preprocessed on PIPP (best 30%), stacked on AutoStakkert3, wavelet sharpening on Registax, final enhancements and mosaic done on Photoshop CS5.