20210614 - Lucky Moon-shot - Learning a bit of Lucky Imaging 🤓

Making the snapshot was fast enough (5ms exposures for 30s), but learning how to process this took a bit longer 😳, 2 weeks … 😅

What was the experience

Up to now, I was approaching moon- and sun-shots like DSO (#subs), but noticed that lucky imaging is obviously better suited for our solar system. Took a couple of AVI videos with the ASIAIR Pro, different exposures (1ms-5ms), and then spent 2 weeks trying to figure out how to process these.

First hurdle: Apparently the ASIAir Pro only takes RAW8 video, whereas most stacking software expects RAW16 🙄. Looking through all kinds of ZWO documentation, but the only way to get the full potential of the ASI183MC camera for lucky imaging, would be through using ASICAP (can’t use Sharpcap or any of the other soft on Mac). No option to re-do this, or convert this. So, RAW8 it was, for now, with a max resolution of only 1920x1080 🙃

Second hurdle: getting it properly debayered/processed in Siril. Tried all different methods of processing (AVI to SER, AVI to FITS sequence, AVI to FITS images, RGGB, BGGR, ), but natively, Siril would keep the data as a single layer monochrome image, with some of the debayer-pixels unmapped (kind of like looking at a picture through a fly screen - not what I wanted)

After several tries, finally found a way to trick Siril into processing my AVI into debayered FITS images and make it believe it’s RGB, and not monochrome

Result: my first ‘lucky’ moon-shoot 🌙🔭🤩

What’s in the picture(s)

Moon, 16% (+)

How it was done

Mount: iOptron SkyGuider Pro

Guiding: ASIAIR Pro, ZWO30F4, ASI120MM (no guiding)

Scope: WO RedCat 51

Camera: ASI183MC Pro

Filter: n/a

Moon@16%(+), Bortle 5/6

Moon: AVI-video, 5ms, 477 frames

Resolution: 1920x1080

Processing: Siril (AVI -FITS images), Adobe Photoshop (Mac)

What have I learned from this

There’s always a way to process things into a nice view 😉

Clear Skies everybody! 🤩✨🔭

#astrophotography #astrophoto #astrophotos

#backyardastronomy #astronomy

#backyardastrophotography

#astrography #astrography_ #backyard

#deepsky #nightsky

#Moon