I had a great opportunity to try out SharpCap's Lunar Live Stacking tool, both on a Celestron 4se using an Altair Astro 294c colour camera and a larger Celestron CPC-800 with a ZWO ASI533mm mono camera.
On Saturday night, I sat down next to the 4se and under the darkening sky observed the Moon using SharpCap's Lunar tool and an Altair Astro 294c camera. The Moon was at 91% illumination and 38 degrees high in the south eastern sky. The diminutive 4se was operating at its native F13 and with the 294c it easily fitted the full Lunar disc into the field of view.
The image below is a running stack of 300 frames at RAW8, 900 gain, 8.203ms sub using just the Fine wavelet slider at 0.486 and surface stabilisation. Other than being flipped vertically and resized in
I don't really do much post processing of images, but as there seemed to be so much detail in the image I gave it a go. Using some filters in
On Sunday night, I setup my Celestron CPC-800 with an uncooled ZWO 533mm mono camera. The CPC-800 was to operate in its native F10 configuration, but I also had a Luminos 2.5x barlow to try out at F25. For many years, the F6.3 focal reducer has been a permanent fixture on this scope. Tonight, however it was returned to its box. Unlike my previous night's observing I could operate the CPC-800 from the comfort of my office, situated at the great distance of 4-5 meters from the scope.
The Moon was even brighter at 96% illumination and also hovered around 30 to 35 degrees of altitude. I use CPWI to control both scopes and the CPC-800 with its decreased field of view had no problem plate-solving during the brief alignment procedure. The focusing had to be moved a long way negative to focus at F10 and even further, later on at F25. The field of view could not accommodate the full Lunar disc.
I didn't realise until I came to write this post, that I had left the 533mm set to the MONO16 colour space! I was wasting a lot of transfer and processing bytes. Next time I will switch to MONO8. To be honest, in my complete ignorance of my mistake, I found the frame rate of the 533 to zip along nicely. I wonder what performance I will get using MONO8.
The image below was from a running stack of 500 subs, 15.276ms exposure, zero gain with Fine and Level 1 wavelet sharpening. The image was transformed, resized and lightly processed in
I was using the excellent Virtual Moon Atlas application to explore the view and gain some insights into what I was actually seeing. The view didn't quite match up until I discovered the "Local zenith on top" checkbox. Checking the box, nicely lined up the live view on the
Next up, I journeyed south to the rayed crater of Tycho and the heavily cratered South Pole of the Moon. All image settings were the same as above with the exception of me playing with the wavelets and image enhancements.
At this point, I added the Luminos 2.5x barlow into the optical train. The image became softer and focusing became harder. Up to this point I had been eye-balling the focus but I tried out SharpCap's focussing tools. I use the Multi-Star
I had three options to try, Contrast, Histogram Range and Fourier. I tried them all and found I could get the Contrast (Edge) Detection to work consistently. Unlike my experience with The last image is a cropped view at F25 of the area around the bright crater Aristarchus (40x40km) and its neighbour Herodotus. I really enjoyed the sinuous Valles Schroteri. A 160km by 10km rille extending to the North before snaking West.
Apologies for the length of the post. I was really excited after my first Lunar observing session in "many Moons"
I might now have the Lunar and Solar bug to go along with my normal Have fun.
Pete
