Recent Lunar Images 10/03/2023

The following lunar images were taken of the waning gibbous Moon just after midnight. Optical configuration Celestron 8 + diagonal. ASI178MC was camera used at 800x600 RAW16 space at 60fps. Each image was averaged with Autostakkert!3 from the best 2500 of 5000 frames taken. Wavelet sharpening done in Paintshop Pro via script by this writer. In the future 800x600 RAW8 will be tested for a higher frame rate. Update: Images reprocessed to remove excessively warm image tone.

Cauchy, Lawrence, Da Vinci craters area

Cyrillus and Theophilus craters

Fracastorius crater area

Hercules & Atlas craters

Hommel crater area

Janssen crater area

Leaky crater area

Lyell & Franz craters area

Miraldi crater area

Montes & Pyrenaeus craters area

Moretus crater area

Posidonius crater area

Piccolomini crater area

Tarantius & Zahringer

Vitruvius & Gardner craters

Multi-Unsharp Mask Sharpening

Until recently I stacked solar system images with Autostakkert!3 and sharpened using wavelet sharpening with Registax. I don't like depending on Registax since it's no longer supported. I decided to experiment with multiple application of un-sharp masks to wavelet sharpen. This approach was inspired by an article "How Unsharp Masking and Laplacian Sharpening Work" by Keith Wiley

A series of Paintshop Pro commands can be saved as an editable Python Script. I saved and modified such a script with a for loop that performs  un-sharp mask repetitions. Number of cycles, radius and strength are settable parameters. A medium denoise it applied after the un-sharp mask cycles. After the script I applied chromatic aberration correction. 

Before and after sharpening images of the Copernicus crater appear below. These images were acquired on a night with the moon just below the celestial equator and with average to below average seeing. 

Ten cycles of  un-sharp masking with radius 2.0 and strength 35 were applied followed by a median denoise with aperture 1.  Close examination of the post script image suggests using the PaintShop Pro built in chromatic aberration removal tool. 

Scripts have also been created for Jupiter and Saturn. More on these in the future as I'm still experimenting with settings. 

Unsharpened 

Wavelet Sharpened

Recent Lunar Images 07/29/2020

These are my first lunar craters imaged with the new ASI178MC camera. Imaging format was 1600x1200. However, in the future, imaging format will likely be reduced, perhaps to 800x600 to focus in on specific craters and increase frames per second rate. A thousand frames were collected using SharpCap, 25% stacked in Autostakkert!3 and wavelet sharpened with Registax 6. 

Tycho Area

Plato Area

Copernicus Area

Clavius Area

Bullialdus Area