Contains:  Solar system body or event
96% Full Supermoon, Oct 1, 2023 featuring Langrenus Crater, psychwolf

96% Full Supermoon, Oct 1, 2023 featuring Langrenus Crater

96% Full Supermoon, Oct 1, 2023 featuring Langrenus Crater, psychwolf

96% Full Supermoon, Oct 1, 2023 featuring Langrenus Crater

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Description

The Unistellar eVscope 2 is not only amazing on deep sky objects, but you can utilize its planetary camera to do wonderful full disc photography of the Moon too. Here's a photograph I'd taken last night at 2am while I was doing some planetary imaging on Jupiter in my backyard. What I love about this, is the contrasty features that the eVscope picked up really well, especially around the crater region by the terminus, which is the lower right.

In particular, there is a dark area on the right side - Mare Crisium, and below it at 5 o'clock in my photo, you have another lava sea, Mare Fecunditatis. In the lower right of that, you get to see the crater Langrenus. Langrenus is best viewed just before or after a full moon. Its walls are about 10,000 feet high, and if not for being near the edge of our view, it would be known widely just like the famous Copernicus crater. Its length is about 90 miles in diameter, and the walls are kind of deteriorated in some areas, and extremely steep in other areas. In the center of it is a 3,000 foot mountain! The whole crater is formed via a meteor impact, estimated between 1 to 3 billion years ago. During Apollo 8, astronaut James Lovell took a closeup and described Langrenus as "quite a huge crater; it's got a central cone to it. The walls of the crater are terraced, about six or seven terraces on the way down." 

When taking photographs of the moon and the eVscope, you just adjust the live view settings to your preference using the gain and exposure sliders on the eVscope menu, and take the live view off of automatic. Once you've got the moon centered in your screen (use movement joystick in "slow" setting if needed), then you can start taking captures. Remember to press the 0.8x button, to get the full lunar disk into view. You can just take one snap and be done with it, which is just fine! Or, you can use the very same planetary processing techniques. In this case, I'd taken 25 snaps of the moon in live view, then, I took the moon images in png format into the planetary stacking software AutoStakkert!, and did an analysis and looked at the quality graph. Because most frames were above the 80% quality graph reading, I chose to keep 75% of the 25 frames I took, and did a blend/raw setting of 65% as well as a normalized stack 65% setting. With the output I did a one bar adjustment in Registax, at very minimal strength, and then did some denoise and brightness leveling in my processor of choice afterward.

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