Contains:  Solar system body or event
A colour image of the Sea of Tranquility, the Lamont submerged crater and Apollo 11, Niall MacNeill
A colour image of the Sea of Tranquility, the Lamont submerged crater and Apollo 11, Niall MacNeill

A colour image of the Sea of Tranquility, the Lamont submerged crater and Apollo 11

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging
A colour image of the Sea of Tranquility, the Lamont submerged crater and Apollo 11, Niall MacNeill
A colour image of the Sea of Tranquility, the Lamont submerged crater and Apollo 11, Niall MacNeill

A colour image of the Sea of Tranquility, the Lamont submerged crater and Apollo 11

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

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Description

I was searching along the terminator of the 5d 11h old Moon, looking for some interesting terrain to image. As I scanned across on the Mare I was struck by the detail in the surface in such excellent relief from the low angle of the Sun. It was clear that there was an oblong shape and I wondered if it was a submerged crater. I decided that this was a most interesting area and set about imaging it. I made RGB and IR 642nm BP runs, with the intention of potentially using the IR run as a Luminance channel, as I have done before with some success. I set the capture limit at 10GB to limit the size file that the processing software would have to handle. With the usb3 connection to the Player One Saturn-M SQR camera the download rate is enormous. The 10GB pf data were captured in ~ 30 secs. The full frame of the sensor at 3000 x 3000 pixels makes for a large FOV, but enormous files sizes. This gave me ~ 1200frames at about 40 fps. The 13ms exposure time would give me more like 70 fps, if unconstrained by the download time. Given the usb3 download rates, this gives you a idea of the file size.
The videos were processed in the normal way and I took the stacked and sharpened images into Photoshop in layers. After cropping and setting to Greyscale, I combined the RGB images to produce a colour image. It was quite a purple colour and clearly needed colour correction. I found a new method of doing that correction. This involves creating a new layer and filling it with 50% grey. By changing the mode to difference the areas of the image that are at this grey level can be readily identified as they are black. Once this area has been marked, the Curves function can be used, with the grey eyedropper, on that spot, to produce a perfect colour balance.
After sharpening the image and using the IR image in a Luminosity Layer, followed by some denoising and supplementary sharpening, I was able to produce this final image. 
What I hadn't realised is that the image was of Mare Tranquillitatus and includes the Apollo 11 landing site and the craters name for the astronauts. I lined up an overlay with an annotated LRO image, as best I could, where the various features are named and the Tranquility base identified, as well as the craters named for Aldrin, Collins and Armstrong. These are in the lower part of the image which can be seen with the mouse-over as Revision B.
I hope you find the remarkable terrain of this region where mankind first set foot on the Moon as interesting as I do. The variety of colours and shading as well as the complexity of the surface texture are truly remarkable.

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Revisions

  • Final
    A colour image of the Sea of Tranquility, the Lamont submerged crater and Apollo 11, Niall MacNeill
    Original
  • A colour image of the Sea of Tranquility, the Lamont submerged crater and Apollo 11, Niall MacNeill
    B

B

Description: Annotated LRO image

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A colour image of the Sea of Tranquility, the Lamont submerged crater and Apollo 11, Niall MacNeill