Tonight the full moon was at its northenmost declination and fairly low in the North as viewed from the Southern tip of Africa. Nonetheless, seeing was excellent and I was up at 2 am to take a few pictures of this glorious sight. I had to first move my 9" f/8 Dobs a few yards in the dark as the moon was behind a tree! The entire full moon was visible in my 25 mm Plossl eyepiece and in the viewfinder of my Fujifilm Finepix2600 camera. I took 33 images with and without a moon filter. The filter images were the best and here is one of them. I optimized contrast, brightness and sharpness with Microsoft Picture-It and cleaned it with Noiseware.
Note the many bright craters and the ejecta rays from the large craters.

Phil

Attached Images

Full Moon_filtered.jpg (77.5 KB, 43 views)

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Nice contrast between light and dark areas.

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Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
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This is an annotated version of the above image.
The craters, Plato, Copernicus, Kepler, Grimaldi, Tycho, Manilius and Langrenus stand out well during a lunar eclipse and can be used to note the progress of the umbra across the lunar surface.

Phil

Attached Images

Full Moon_filtered_annot.JPG (62.6 KB, 17 views)

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Hi Phil nice photos I like your annotated version. Take care Paul

I stacked 8 of the best afocal images of the full moon with Registax and compared the result with the single image above.
In my opinion the stacked image is a better one.
Do you agree?

Phil

Attached Images

Full Moon Collage2.jpg (55.5 KB, 14 views)

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Phil,

I agree that the stacked version is better.

Did you do any wavelet sharpening in Registax?

--Andy

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Thanks, Andy. No, I do not do wavelet sharpening. I am too stupid. I do not understand how to use it. Would love to do it though. I never know which layer to do. Shoot me!

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I enjoyed your annotated version very much. Thanks for sharing!

As far as the stacked vs. non-stacked image, I say there's only a slight difference - the darker areas are more pronounced, but not necessarily sharper than the non-stacked image (at least how it looks on my PC). Both are good though.

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Die Sonne scheidet hinter dem Gebirge. In alle Täler steigt der Abend nieder
mit seinen Schatten, die voll Kühlung sind.

Yes, I agree that the difference is not all that pronounced.
In fact, I am surprised at the quality I sometimes get with a single image.

Phil

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Phil,

There is no magic to it. Just slide one of the layers up on the wavelets screen and see how it looks. If you go to far, it looks over sharpened, so just back off a bit. It really works like magic. You just play with the settings until you like what you see.

I took the liberty of sharpening your collage. The wavelet settings are 7.1, 1.0, 5.8, 1.0, 8.5, and 1.0. It is a little noisy, but starting from a jpeg there is more noise to begin with.

HTH,

--Andy

Attached Images

Full-Moon-Collage2-Wavelet.jpg (143.1 KB, 4 views)

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Thank you Andy! It makes a big difference I must say.
I am certainly going to play around with it and see what I can come up with.

Phil

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