Moon on Dec 30
Image of the moon from yesterday, Saturday evening, at lunation 10.6.
Clear skies again here in Louisville, CO; temperature around 24°F; no wind; humidity 45%; transparency very good; and turbulence fair, around 5/10. Celestron Nexstar11 telescope, F6.3 focal reducer, and Canon Xti digital camera at 1/1250 sec shutter and ASA 400. Since illuminated portion no longer fits into camera’s FOV, it was necessary to acquire images for northern and southern hemispheres and then combine them. Thirty images for each hemisphere were aligned, stacked, and wavelet filtered with Registarx4 and then cropped, aligned, and merged with Photoshop2.
December 31st, 2006 at 8:05 pm
Happy New Year to you and your family.
December 31st, 2006 at 8:33 pm
Hi Andrew!
Happy New Year to you as well! Best wishes for dark, clear skies throughout the year as well.
January 1st, 2007 at 12:38 pm
Hi Vern,
Happy New Year to you & yours. Wishing you a happy, prosperous New Year. That way you can spend more time with making and sharing the beautiful images of the heavens.
All the best! peter
January 1st, 2007 at 2:52 pm
Happy New Year Vern hope you have a great 2007
mark_smith
November 30th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
Hey, you’ve got some great images here!! I just purchased the same camera as you on ebay; haven’t gotten it yet. I have the Celestron CPC 1100 GPS; I love it. Even with my cheapy 5 pixel old camera just held up to the eyepiece I got a pretty good shot of the moon (see ravnostic.com homepage for one image), but I can’t WAIT to see what I can do with the SLR. I’m sure you’re a busy guy, but any tips you could give me would be great, especially about graininess when photographing dim objects and how to overcome that (you certainly did) and how to get a longer exposure time than 30 seconds; that’s what the Canon spec page listed for the XTi. Best wishes to you and yours.
November 30th, 2007 at 7:10 pm
To get rid of noise present in low light images, the best way is to stack multiple images, 15 or more. Download and install the Registax4 application from http://www.astronomie.be/registax/. I convert to bmp or png first with Photoshop and then stack them with Registax4. If your computer has lots of memory (1 GB+), you should be able to stack even the huge images that the Xti produces.
For exposures longer than 30 sec you need to purchase a remote shutter release or make your own. Also, the Canon TC80N3 timer remote control cable can be patched to work with the Xti — the connector isn’t correct but it can be replaced with a radioshack minijack. Visit some online groups like http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/digital_astro/ for some howto advise and examples of what others are doing.
Vern
December 21st, 2007 at 3:19 pm
hi,
i’m looking for photos of the moon from november 3, 2006. something life changing happened to me on that evening and i’m hoping to capture it with a beautiful photo of the moon and thought you may be able to help. i appreciate your time and photos! thanks…
elena
December 21st, 2007 at 4:07 pm
I don’t have any photos of the moon on that particular date. However, on the evening of Nov 3, 2006, the Moon was approximately 13 days after new and 97% illuminated, in other words about one day before full moon. It would have appeared very similar to this one
Dec 14,2005
Vern