More of the Moon

I don't know why, but lately I've been extremely interested in lunar and planetary imaging.  Using my Lu135m camera I've managed to capture some great images of the moon. The imaging chip in the Lu135m is 1/2" and when pared with my C11 has a very small field of view, around 5' x 7'.  This is about 1/4 the diameter of the moon which means I'd have to take about 20 pictures to  cover the entire moon.  Even a waxing/waning moon would be more than a 12 photo panorama. 

That's exactly what I did.  I started with 2000 frame images that I stacked in Registx. And then needed 12 or 14 images to cover the entire moon.  Simple multiplication gives over 24000 frames.  It ended up eating up a fairly sizable portion of my hard drive.  But the results were pretty spectacular.

 

 

After some great lunar images I turned my attention to Jupiter.  Unlike the moon, a great image of Jupiter requires a colour photo.  This is where the Lu135m gets a bit tricky to use.  Its a monochrome image so to create a colour image I had to take a LRGB frames (2000 frames each) and combine them using Nebulosity and GIMP.  

The images all turned out quite nicely.  I especially like the fact that in the image of Jupiter you can see not only the Great Red Spot, but also two of the Galilean moons.  Hopefully there are more clear nights in the future!