There was a favorable libration the nights of Feb 17 and 18 which provided a view of Mare Orientale. Orientale, thought to be the youngest large impact basin on the Moon, is located right on the western limb of the Moon and rarely provides a good view. During favorable librations the Moon is tilted a few degrees further to the east than normal bringing Mare Orientale into a very slightly better view. I was clouded out on Feb 17 but had clear skies on Feb 18 allowing me to try to image Mare Orientale. Seeing, unfortunately, wasn't the best so I used an Antlia IR685pass filter along with lucky imaging to make the best of the situation. My laptop recently lost its USB3 capabilities so I was imaging at USB2 speeds.
This image is a mosaic of 4 smaller overlapping ROIs which allowed me to achieve 53fps, a far cry from the 150 or more fps I would have been able to get with USB3. I stacked the best 100 of 1000 frames in AutoStakkert3, sharpened the 4 resulting images in RegiStax6 and combined them in Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE). I used Photoshop to tweak the final image and to add annotation. I was a bit disappointed with the final result and hope to revisit Mare Orientale at some of its favorable librations later this year.
The first image is the final image before adding annotation. Putting your cursor over the image should show the annotated version so you can switch back and forth just by moving the cursor onto and off of the image.
Here is a link to Mare Orientale images made from the LROC data showing the features captured in my image above.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/sonnymanleyphoto/51896757153/in/album-72157698173614984/
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