Christmas in Alberta

During the holidays I packed up my telescope and drove 1500 km back to my hometown of Edmonton. The weather cooperated quite nicely and even though I was only there for 5 days I managed to cart my telescope out to Elk Island Park.  Yes, it was snowy and yes, it was cold but the sky was clear and the lack of moon made for some terrific seeing. 

I was managed to take about 45 minutes of photos of IC 1805 before I literally got scared off by a pack of wolves.  That in itself is an interesting story; unfortunately because I got about 1/4 the exposure time I wanted the image is quite dim.  But its still noticeable.  I guess the nice thing is all I really need to patience.  The nebula isn't really going anywhere.

Registax

Its almost universally known that the easiest way to take high quality pictures of the moon or planets is using a small webcam.

The webcam is used to take a video which is essentially hundreds or thousands of individual pictures.  Computer programs like Registax look through all the individual pictures and pick out the highest quality images (the ones with the least atmospheric degradation, best focus, least movement) and stack those into one image. 

Although I've managed to get some nice pictures of Jupiter and Saturn this way it would be extremely difficult to get a complete image of the moon, particularly with any detail..  This is mostly due to the very small size of the image generated by the webcam.  The field of view is incredibly small; great for individual craters but impossible for the entire moon.

My previous post showed a high resolution image I am working on using Registax and my DSLR.  Instead of using a webcam I took about 100 shots of the moon on my DSLR and loaded them into Registax. At first this basically overwhelmed Registax and my computer's processing power.  Registax is designed to process pictures that are around 100 kb and I was loading pictures that were 18 Mb.  After a bit of fiddling around I found a way to get Registax to chug through them; there is a stacking option to use the minimum file sizes possible.  This isn't usually an issue when stacking tiny files from webcams but in this case it was an absolute necessity. If your using Registax version 6 its also a good idea to chose a small number of alignment points.  On a lunar shot you can get several thousand points but you really only need less than two dozen for decent alignment.  If you use the default alignment setting it will take forever to finish the alignment and stacking processes.

Even on my Quad-core desktop the processing took a while.  But once it was done I had one piece of my lunar mosaic.  Even with the wide field my DSLR gave me it only covered about 1/4 of the moon.  I repeated the imaging and stacking 4 more times and then had to stitch the final images together.

I accomplished this with the help of a great program called iMerge (although others have told me it can be done in Photoshop).

I'm still working on getting the colour better corrected and then I might restart the entire project with a barlow attached to get a slightly larger image.  It depends how long the post-processing takes.

High Resolution Lunar Picture

After nearly 2 months of almost constant rain it finally cleared up.  And wouldn't you know it, it was about 3 days before a full moon.  So rather than do some maybe marginal deep sky photography I opted instead to try some high resolution shots of the lunar terminator (basically the line that separates the shadow from the illuminated part of the moon). Using my DSLR it took a while before the pictures would stack properly (more to come on that later) but eventually I managed to get three nice shots of difference parts of the moon.  Using a great program called iMerge I was able to combine those shots into one nice panorama shot of the moon.  I'm still working on getting the colours to seamlessly match so you can still tell where the different shots overlap. 

Unlike many of the other lunar pictures I've taken this one is relatively high-resolution.  If you download the picture you can actually zoom in on many different parts of the surface, particularly around the terminator and get some amazing lunar vistas.