There was a thread a few weeks ago ( __HERE__ ) that touched on whether you could record earthshine using the same exposure as used for the sunlit side of a crescent moon. I've always believed that would be difficult given the limited dynamic range of today's CMOS cameras but I decided yesterday to give it a try on some data that I recorded earlier this month using a Stellarvue SV80ST2 scope and a cooled ZWO ASI183MM Pro camera.
I have already posted an image showing a "normal" processing for the sunlit side of the January 17th crescent moon ( __HERE__ ) and so I went back to that same data and tried a high dynamic range processing using PixInsight's ArcsinhStretch and HDRMultiscaleTransform processes. The end result was close to what I would call acceptable, with detail on both the sunlit and earth-lit sides of the moon. It's not perfect by any means, but it's close enough (I think) to show that there is potential in this technique.
In the case of this image that was taken on January 17, the moon was getting near to a rather "late" early crescent and that makes the recording of the earthshine even more difficult. Also, this is certainly not the first time that techniques like this have been posted to CN. Here is a thread from about one year ago where several others posted images using similar techniques (processing a single exposure to show earthshine):
https://www.cloudyni.../#entry10143738
One area where I could improve on my result is by taking more frames, since I had only 133 subs to stack to produce detail on the dark side of the moon. Plus, I think the base exposure could be changed to record more shadow detail and I'm not even sure whether a red filter was the right choice for this type of image (since the shadow side of the moon is probably more blue than red). Lastly, this certainly isn't the limit of what could be done within PixInsight, as tweaks to the processing could produce better results. Notably, I spent very little time with masking to produce this image (in fact, I used NO masking with ArcsinhStretch).
One other possibility would be to blend the normally processed sunlit side of this same sequence with the enhanced processing for the dark side.
Just to be clear, this image was produced using one set of 133 subs that were all exposed for for the same 15ms (that's what I selected to produce a properly exposed image of the sunlit side of the moon, when I originally took this sequence I wasn't trying to record the earthshine). Typically, when I go out to record earthshine I either expose for the dark side ( __HERE__ ) and/or use multiple sequences with the thought of doing an HDR composite with varying exposure times ( __HERE__, not a very good attempt). The image below is NOT any of the latter, just one, short sequence using a fixed 15ms exposure.
Processing was done in PixInsight and Photoshop CC2021. Image capture was done in Sequence Generator Pro (an app that I almost never use for planetary capture, but I took these prior to a session to image the Orion Nebula and Bode's Galaxies).
C&C welcomed.
Attached Thumbnails
Edited by james7ca, 25 January 2021 - 07:38 AM.
