Hi gang! I thought I would play a little in Photoshop CS tonight, and used a technique I found on Steve Quirk's Astronomy Site at http://www.hwy.com.au/~sjquirk/gstar...p-masking.html. The attached photo is my result.

This is a combination of two separate images taken just moments apart during the Moon's occultation of The Pleiades, M45 on the evening of December 3rd, 2006. A single 2-second image captured some of the stars in the open cluster M45, while a single 1/350th-second exposure captured the near Full Moon.

A Meade 5" AR-5 achromat refractor was mounted on a Losmandy G-11 German Equatorial Mount which was very roughly polar aligned. A Canon 20D in prime focus configuration took the images. The telescope actually was the camera "lens" for this prime focus series. Focal length of the telescope was 1180mm (f/9.3). Both images were taken at ISO 100 and a remote shutter release was used. There still is some blurring of the stars in M45 due to windy conditions at the time.

Both images were combined in Photoshop CS, and using a layer mask and Gaussian blur, the overly bright and overexposed Moon was "masked" to allow the stars in the image frame to appear. Slight adjustments were made using Shadows and Highlights before a final unsharp masking and cropping to 4x6 size.

Because of the brightness of the Moon, I was unable to really see where all of M45 was in the sky. The 1180mm focal length also limited the amount of sky visible to some degree. But better camera orientation would have helped with the composition.

I've read that another occultation of the Moon and The Pleiades will occur on Saturday, January 27th. Perhaps I will be able to get a better series of images at that time.

Attached Images

Moon and Pleiades 4x6 small.jpg (89.8 KB, 28 views)

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This is excellent!! You did a great job!! Thanks for posting.

Phil

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This is one from years back...an attempt to duplicate a photo in Michael Covington's book...400 speed film, a 50 mm lens (IIRC), and a time exposure, 20 seconds I think...during a full lunar eclipse...see the Pleiades off to the left?

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