Waning gibbous harvest moon (17 September 2019)
This colourful astrophotograph of the moon in its waning gibbous phase is a mosaic of 3 tiles, taken just after the Harvest Moon. Taken at 23:15 on 17 September 2019 in the East Midlands of the UK, it is about 91% illuminated. The data was collected in 3 minutes just before packing up: It’s 3× 1-minute videos at 200 fps, with each processed video providing 1 tile. I was getting tired, took these images quickly on the spur of the moment, and was a bit careless in overlapping the frames to capture the whole visible moon; hence the 3 missing segments. Note that as I captured about 25 GB of data here, it took me a bit longer than 3 minutes to process all the captured frames into this single processed one! In processing, I boosted the vibrancy to bring out the colours of the lunar surface.
Frames
- 3× 1-minute videos at 200 fps
- No calibration frames
Equipment
- Explore Scientific ED 102 mm apo f/7 refractor
- Sky-Watcher EQ5 PRO SynScan GOTO equatorial mount
- Altair GPCAM3 290C colour camera (with UVIR window fitted)
Software
- SharpCap Pro
- Autostakkert for stacking
- Registax for wavelet sharpening
- Photoshop for aligning and blending tiles and final processing
