Well with Jupiter now gone from the skies, Mars about 7 months away, Saturn obstructed by stupid roof/trees during its brief visibility at 4am, I've been pointing some optics at the moon.

My Canon 450D DSLR camera on a tripod. First is a stack of 8 images, second of 16 (to smooth out high ISO noise):

http://www.smugmug.com/photos/449959552_zzUzG-X3.png http://www.smugmug.com/photos/454180988_q5bMr-X3.png


My 640x480 webcam mounted on the telescope, magnified and showing (Earth's) atmospheric turbulence:




Same webcam on telescope, panning to show entire visible side of the moon:




Stills from the previous video stacked, processed and stitched together to form a panorama of sorts (click for larger res):

http://www.smugmug.com/photos/449960682_o3c5p-XL.png

Next? Buying the necessary adapters and optics to mount the 12MP DSLR camera directly onto the telescope, instead of the current 640x480 webcam. What will it look like? Imagine the first two images in this thread at approx 2800x2800 resolution instead of the 480x480 you see! Detail++

(EDIT: scaled down larger image)

Awesome.

I saw the moon as it was rising last night and it looked f***ing incredible; really big and yellow just on the horizon. I saw on APOD that it's at its closest point for the year - it's worth a look too.

there was a pretty good shot of the moon last nite during the cricket

Nice work, looks really great. Can't wait to see it if you managed to get the 12MP camera set up!

my wife has that camera (I have the 400D) what's this "stack" you're doing? are you just merging them in photoshop? and if so, how.

props parabol :D

my wife has that camera (I have the 400D) what's this "stack" you're doing?

Basically my aim is to shoot at the fastest shutter speed to 'freeze' atmospheric turbulence and the Moon's motion across the sky, to reduce blurring. So I shoot at a high-ish ISO setting (800 or 1600), which causes heaps of noise/grain - visible in this single frame:

http://www.smugmug.com/photos/454499469_ionAD-X3.png

So I take heaps of sequential shots, use a program like PCFE to crop and centre/align the moon in each frame, then Registax to pick the best frames then stack them. Here's the stack of 16, notice the grain is gone but it's now a tiny bit blurrier:

http://www.smugmug.com/photos/454499496_LUBTR-X3.png

Then we apply some Lucy-Richardson Deconvolution in a program like Astra Image to unblur and bring out the detail:

http://www.smugmug.com/photos/454499542_F5sXU-X3.png

So yeah, I find I spend half my time shooting and the other half just image processing.

Here's the same done to my Jupiter shots. In order: single frame of Green channel, stacked Green frames, Wavelet sharpened RGB:

http://www.smugmug.com/photos/454503727_NX22o-X3.png http://www.smugmug.com/photos/454503739_z7Wiv-X3.png http://www.smugmug.com/photos/454503756_UkG8V-X3.png

last edited by parabol at 12:45:11 14/Jan/09

nice. i was thinking of getting out the 20D last night when i saw the "big" moonrise

really big

its the same size all the time.
oops, i mean its the same time all night - not during the year.

last edited by mooby at 13:56:58 14/Jan/09

what lens? and do you have the canon programatic shutter release? its the bomb. i got it for my trip to greenland so i could take northern light pics without touching the cam. can do lots of s*** with it.

Well with Jupiter now gone from the skies

whats the bright "thing" to the west then each night? venus? but its there till well after 10

last edited by mooby at 13:58:26 14/Jan/09

what lens?

55-250mm IS kit lens. For these shots set to f/5.6 @ 250mm. The first shot with manual focus via LiveView 10x magnification, second photo was done using contrast autofocus via LiveView.

and do you have the canon programatic shutter release?

I'm using the RC-1 infrared remote:

http://www.canon.com.au/products/slr_camera_accessories/remote_controls/1576.html

In future I'll probably set it to auto-take 10 shots @ 3.5fps after a 2 second delay (without remote), that way it's a bit more automated than manually hitting the remote's button at irregular intervals.

whats the bright "thing" to the west then each night? venus? but its there till well after 10

Yeah Venus. Jupiter is pretty much hugging the sun at the moment, so invisible to us for all intents and purposes. If you look N/NE at around 4am, you'll see Saturn, but since the rings are side-on .. it's not as bright as usual and harder to pick out.

last edited by parabol at 15:16:15 14/Jan/09