It has been a long time since I imaged our Moon. Nearly two years by my records!
Recently I have aquired a Coma Corrector for my 1000mm focal length Newtonian F5 telescope. This is very good at removing coma across the large field of the Artemis 285 CCD Chip. I decided to experiment using the Moon as a target.
This image is a mosaic of two frames. Each frame was about 50 stacked frames. When using Artemis with very short exposures on very bright targets, you get some kind of "bleeding" effect. I do not know if this is electronic or optical in nature. I understand it is electronic. This image shows the unprocessed image with the vertical bleeding.
Of course, Artemis is not designed to image such bright targets, but it was fun to try - the huge chip and 2 frame mosaic is very tempting! I removed the bleed during processing. I am quite pleased with this result. Please see this full sized image
I also tried to capture the Moon through my RGB filters to make one of those silly super saturated colour images, but I could not get the colours properly balanced, so any saturation increase just highlighted my colour inbalances.
Just for laugh I did saturn as well. Here is the result... I am not much good at planets!
Captured in Artemis Capture. Stacked in registax. Mosaic of two frames by hand in photoshop. Bleed removed in photoshop. Sharpened in maxim.
Current Imaging equipment configuration
Exposure Details :
Coma Corrector 100x0.002s on 200mm @ F5 with ART285
Curdridge Observatory, Southampton,UK
