Telescope Reviews: Selected moon areas of 22 Sept 2008

Dear friends,

I have already published the results of my imaging session of 22 September, when I could make a Moon panorama with my new scope.
Here are some more pictures made with bigger scale, processing of them required to elaborate a little bit more complex procedure for Registax. This is an “artificial reference frame” approach.
We never know which frame of the whole AVI file is the best and have a true geometry. Reference frame can be distorted both in terms of sharpness and geometry we have all seen that Moon is like a flag at the wind, waves are coming and going away even when the smallest details are visible well.
So I decided to make an artificial reference using not an internal possibilities of the Registax (make reference) but with two sequential runs. But to do this, I split the whole AVI to BMP files, and as I work with b/w camera – converted them to 8bit grayscale BMP to reduce the files size.
Then I loaded the files to Registax and made 1 point alignment with the biggest size of the alignment box (512x512). Result was processed with wavelets and then saved as BMP file to the folder with initial BMPs.
After it I repeated the procedure using this reference for multipoint alignment with very few points – 6 points of 128x128 size. During this procedure I use a reference with averaged “true” geometry and reasonably good presentation of fine details. Using multipoint alignment at this stage makes next “artificial reference” frame better in terms of sharpness uniformity across the frame.
After this second reference is created, we can use it for final multipoint alignment with as many points as necessary to cover the frame with reasonable accuracy.

Here are the results of such approach:
Apenninus, Archimedes, Autolycus, Aristillus
Clavius, Tycho, Maginus, Longomontanus

Images were taken through TAL-250K scope with Barlow set to give 1.44x (instead of original 2x), red filter 650nm+, VAC-135 camera 1280x1024 with 15fps.

AVI of 2500 frames was taken for each area, processing was as mentioned above.

All your comments are welcome!

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Clear skies for all!
Dmitry Makolkin

Edited by dvmak (10/12/08 12:20 PM)