I'm proud to show my most detailed Moon image after 3 days of work

Image from preview.redd.it and submitted by Astronophilos
image showing I'm proud to show my most detailed Moon image after 3 days of work

chungoglungus on September 13rd, 2021 at 15:44 UTC »

What lens is this?

Astronophilos on September 13rd, 2021 at 15:45 UTC »

I use to do Moon mosaics. You can see my whole work with some detailed Moon mosaics on Instagram at "astronophilos". Every following means a lot to me, thank you!

About the technique: The technique consists in taking several videos as a serie of snapshots (9x2,200 snapshots here). The sensor of my planetary camera being very small, only a small part of the Moon is visible in the field of view. That's why I take videos part by part, and reconstruct the whole image of the Moon in processing. I have aligned and stacked between 3% and 5% of the best quality frames to obtain a final detailed picture for each video (9 images in total). I have finally stitched these 9 pictures together to reconstruct the whole image of this first quarter.

About the composite: I have added a full Moon to make the dark part appear, as well as an over-exposed shot to bring this bright glow around the Moon. I have observed stars on another part of the sky and added them in processing.

A bit of science: The colors you see reveal the mineral composition of the Moon. Reddish/orange areas are composed of iron oxydes, while blue/purple areas are titanium. They can not be seen with the naked eye, but can be highlighted by increasing the saturation in processing.

My setup: This was taken with a Maksutov 150/1800 telescope, on a HEQ5 Pro Mount, with an iNova PLB Cx camera. I made the observations from my balcony in a middle of a city.

Note: I've started to do Moon mosaics a year ago being inspired by the awesome work of Andrew McCarthy

Zuliman on September 13rd, 2021 at 19:32 UTC »

Absolutely stunning! Selling highquality prints? I would love this as a gift to my 9 year old.