[Theme] Show us your best moon (and solar system) images

[MFloyd]

Thanks, Erik, a lot of dramatic views happen when observing the sun at high magnification through a solar filter and drifting clouds, but I thought this one was special.

Very nice supermoon MFloyd. I never seem to be able to make the foreground appear sharp with the moon, probably not enough distance around here unless the moon is at very far away mountains low on the horizon.

Thx. I just quickly measured the distance of the mountain flank from my house, appearing on the picture: 1890m. With my 500mm and TC2.0 (1000 mm), on a D850, at f/18, is within the depth of field, even focusing the moon. In the latter case my field of depth extends to 1.86km, just within range. 

The same Super Moon, the day after, from the same spot (my place) with some Efex Pro 4 treatment (to increase detail). What do you think ?


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Place shot from:


IMG_1782.jpg

[Øivind Tøien]

Thanks for the documentation of the foreground conditions. Looks like a beautiful evening.

I actually think your first capture was better. With the reservation that seeing might have been worse during the second capture, the treatment seems mostly to do a local contrast enhancement without actually getting more detail. This is the kind of "detail enhancement" frequently seen in phone captures, which are optimized for viewing at smaller sizes. But the result tends towards thick lines etc. when viewed at larger magnification. In Registax this effect appears when applying the higher order wavelets too strongly.

[MFloyd]

Thank you for your feedback. Was not too convinced about the result 

[Nasos Kosmas]

That’s my yesterdays  capture
I let the moon rise a bit for better clarity
500pf 2x TCIII 1/250 sec f 14 iso400 no tripod, z50 no crop
I see some CA at the edge of the moon circle

[ColinM]

Judging the sharpness of moon images turns out to be harder than I'd first assumed.

MFloyd you've posted a few recently.

I initially felt this one wasn't as sharp/clear as some i'd seen.

The same Super Moon, the day after, from the same spot (my place) with some Efex Pro 4 treatment (to increase detail). What do you think ?

By comparison, the most recent from Nasos, gave me a feeling of more clarity & sharpness.

But i now realise that many of the details on the central portion of a full moon don't have as many visual cues to help us judge clarity. In your one noted above, there's fairly uniform even Illumination

But if the lighting is coming at an angle, many of the craters on the edges of the moon can show high contrast and the impression of greater sharpness. This happens more when its not a full moon.

This is apparent in both Nasos b&w shot and your one from a few days ago:

Yesterday night, Super Moon in the Valais (Switzerland), hiding behind the mountain.

[Øivind Tøien]

I mostly find that optical quality of the atmosphere (seeing) is typically the main determinant of resolution of moon and other solar system images. MFloyd' s second image above also carries the tell tale signs of a quite wiggly edge of the moon where the line should be smoother indicating such problems. Conditions can change from minute to minute, so taking a series of captures and selecting the best helps (the principle behind "lucky imaging technique").

Side light on the moon as in Naso's capture certainly helps with the impression. This quarter moon capture is from early April with 300PF+TC-20E III on D500. Seeing was not fantastic, but not bad either.

[MFloyd]

Yes, conditions can change minute by minute. This one, shot two years ago, around the same period (6 July 2020, full moon decreasing), same place.


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Nikon D850
Nikkor 500.0 mm PF f/5.6E + TC 2.0 III
ƒ/11.0  1000.0 mm 1/80s ISO 100

Not being too familiar shooting moon shots, it appears to me being more a random good luck exercise 

Having not tried image stacking. Somebody has ?

[Øivind Tøien]

I did a stacked moon capture and a series of stacked Mars captures back on page 12 of this thread:
https://nikongear.net/revival/index.php?topic=1867.msg163322#msg163322

Repeating one of them here:
"Again I got the best results with stacked TC-20EIII+TC-14E with the 300mm f/4 PF, mostly 2/3 stop down,  on AW1 (open in new tab for 1920x1920 resolution):
#1"



Shrinking Mars:
https://nikongear.net/revival/index.php?topic=1867.msg165403#msg165403

[MFloyd]

  Waw  very nice. Worth a trial tonight. I like also the grey tone of the moon.

[Øivind Tøien]

Thanks, I was quite pleased with how the nuances in the tones came out, realistically showing the geology without looking un-natural.

You might want to look into the details of my original posts. While it is more common to stack video frames, I used intermittent high speed frame captures with my AW1. With electronic shutter there was no worry about shutter wear from the 1000+ frames I typically used as starting point for selecting these stacks.

[Erik Lund]

Unbelievable sharpness here, clearly show that you are in a very dry/low disturbance spot!

[Øivind Tøien]

Thanks, Erik. We can have some nice and very clear cool nights in the fall as during that capture, but once we go into winter, we get inversion layers and ice fog wrecking both seeing and transparency.

[ColinM]

Deleted - I couldn't get the (satisfactory) original image PP'd enough to appear well here

[MFloyd]

Milky Way in the Wallis (CH)


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Please, click on the image for better resolution.

Taken from my home, for convenience reasons. Could do better by going in the mountains with less light pollution. Stacking picture, with separate treatment of foreground and sky. The, automatic alignment (Ps) of the sky is not too satisfactory, so that I had to reduce the original 10 layer pile to 4, to achieve a more or less satisfactory balance between noise and sharpness.

[Øivind Tøien]

In this case the glow behind the mountain makes the image look interesting - if one does not know better one can pretend it is sky glow.

Dedicated stacking programs like Deep Sky Stacker will likely do a better job in aligning the stars. But with landscapes one will always have to choose between star trails or blurry foreground unless one combines multiple sequences in post. Sequator has a mode where it tries to get around that, but I have limited success with the star alignment - DSS does a better job. Stacks of wide-angle images can sometimes have troubles in the corners though. This link has a stack with DSS from my 10.5mm and is doing pretty well, but there is some blurriness in the upper left corner. https://nikongear.net/revival/index.php?topic=1992.msg177426#msg177426