Images of crater Tycho, located in the southern highlands of the moon, captured on two consecutive days. Revision C is a quick compilation of both images into an AnimatedGIF.

Original Sep 6th 2023,  04:28 UT
Revision B Sep 7th 2023,  03:50 UT
Revision C Time-lapse movie of both images

On the morning of Sep 6th 2023, seeing was fair-good (~ 6-7 on the Pickering Scale) according to the star test using Capella before the planetary and lunar imaging session. On the next morning, seeing slightly deteriorated to Pickering 4-5 (poor-fair) based on a similar Capella star test. The video capture of Tycho with MP4 and YouTube compression is available here.

Processing of the IR data is based on the tutorials Processing Lunar images with Photoshop by Damian Peach and Imaging the Moon: Capture and Process, Stack, Sharpen by Refreshing Views.

If you want to process the data yourself, I uploaded the raw stacks straight out of AS!3 (Sep 6th 2023, Sep 7th 2023).

Equipment

Celestron C14 Edge HD @ f=6650 mm (F/28), res = 0.09"/px
+ Celestron CGE Pro mount
+ Celestron EF
+ ZWO ASI 290 MM
+ Baader 2x VIP Barlow
+ ZWO EFW
+ Baader IR (685 nm) filter
+ Tempest Cooler
+ Omegon Dew Heater
+ Astrozap Dew Shield for C 14

Very short imaging train: I simply screwed the Baader VIP Barlow into the nose piece of the ZWO EFW. However, the small pixel size of the ZWO ASI 290 MM leads to a pixel scale of 0.09"/px at a reasonable f-ratio of f/28.

IR: 5000 frame  SER movie
1x1 bin

recorded with Firecapture

Moon 59° above the horizon
Seeing: Pickering 4-7 (poor - good)

Postprocessing

IR

Autostakkert!3:
- Stacking 500 of 5000 frames
- Image Stabilization: Surface, Improved Tracking, Cropped
- Quality Estimator: Laplace, Noise Robust 5, Local
- Reference Frame: Autosize
- Minimum AP size = 104, Min Bright = 20, Multi-Scale

Registax:
- histogram correction to increase the brightness of the underexposed image
- wavelet sharpening using Wavelet filter Gaussian, step increment = 0, no linked wavelets:
layer 2 - 100, denoise & sharpen

Photoshop CS2:
- image crop
- level corrections to clip the black levels of the shadows
- unsharp mask (amount: 21%, radius: 1.9 px)
- sharpen
- slight noise reduction

Revision C

PTGUI:
- image alignment

PixInsight:
- Adding annotations

PIPP:
- Create AnimatedGIF with 0.75 frams/s

Schwentinental (Germany)

-CS Daniel