This image started out as a 'let's just capture this data' project and ended up in 3 straight days of processing and revising.
And while it was really tedious to process those 56 panels with partly bad seeing or not enough overlap, it was totally worth it!
I learned quite a lot about lunar geography and got really excited exploring the locations of the Apollo landing sites. (
Here you can find an annotated version of this shot with the names of major surface features and those Apollo landing sites.)
The feature I got to like the most, is the region around Rima Hadley close to the Apennine mountains, where the Apollo 15 mission landed in 1971. With my setup I archieve an image scale of about 425m/px, so I also made a little crop and
overlayed the paths that Scott and Irvin took during their EVAs.
I encourage you to
zoom in for yourself and explore some of the features in a bit more perspective than lunar detail images can provide.
Processing:
- Best 30-200 Frames stacked in Autostakkert 3 (depending on seeing quality)
- in Pixinsight (in Batch mode): Histogram, RestorationFilter, Decon, UnsharpMask ( ACDNR and heavier sharpening for panels with low frame counts)
- Microsoft ICE for stitching
- In Pixinsight:
1. Luminance extraction, ATrousWaveletTransform for local contrast enhancements and curves for global contrast
2. on color image: CurvesTransformation and HistogramTransformation for color balance and saturation
3. MultiscaleMedianTransform to reduce color noise
4. ChannelCombination with Luminance
5. Crop
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