Earth's Moon, RGB, 4 May 2020 (David Dearden)

Earth's Moon, RGB, 4 May 2020

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

~1.5 light-sec (~250,000 miles)

Under the mantra “when the Moon is out, shoot the Moon” I decided to try an RGB image of the Moon so I could play around with “mineral” processing. I do so little lunar/planetary astrophotography that it felt like I was learning it all over again, but SharpCap and Autostakert! are both fairly intuitive; I spent a lot of time trying to figure out where the controls to my focuser were in SharpCap, but eventually I found them. I stacked the best 25% of frames for each color channel, using automatic alignment point selection in Autostakert!. I manually aligned R, G, & B, followed by an “autocolor” in Photoshop. “Mineral” processing literally involved nothing more than boosting the saturation way up. Finally, I did a little unsharp mask sharpening to both. I intend to post both the “normal” RGB (see the "Original" image) and the “mineral” version. It is amazing to me how much the “mineral” version brings up details, but I worry that some of the details are really just from misaligning the color channels.

Date: 4 May 2020

Subject: the Moon

Scope: AT8IN+High Point Scientific Coma Corrector (~900 mm FL)

Mount: Skywatcher EQ-6

Guiding: none

Camera: ZWO ASI1600MM-cool at auto-aim (~51), -20 °C

Acquisition: SharpCap 3.1.1586.0

Exposure: ~900 frames (120 sec) SER captured at about 9 fps for each of RGB

Stacking: Autostakkert, best 25%, automatic alignpoints, sharpened; Photoshop manual RGB align and unsharp mask 100% 2 pixels, Astronomy Tools Astroframe.

Original
B
Final
C

B

Description: This is the "mineral" version, simply with enhanced saturation.

Uploaded: ...

C

Description: "Mineral" version with no additional sharpening applied per Michael Feigenbaum's suggestion. I think I like this one better.

Uploaded: ...

Image the Universe
ZWO ASI1600MM/QHY163M
Fast Newtonians

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