The morning of the 25th was cold and crisp and clear! The moon was high above the house, and as luck would have it, above the roof line of the observatory! So, the poor dog forwent her morning walk so I could fiddle around and capture some lunar data!
Ideally, I would have liked to have swapped the scope over to the 6" F/12 Cassegrain but I don't (yet) have electronic focusing for that scope, so I left the Esprit 100 on the mount and just swapped out the ASI533 for my Atik GP.
This image is unbarlowed, 20% of the 4,000 frames I captured. I recorded four separate SER files, each one being 1,000 frames and then joined them together in PIPP before taking into AS!3 for stacking. I had recently watched a session that Emil had presented at the 2019 AIC, and this gave me some things to try during the stacking process - multi-scale alignment points being the key one! Instead of being limited to one size of alignment point, you can until the 'Replace AP' option, tick the 'Multiscale' option, and then place a second set of APs at a different scale. For this first image I chose 24 then 96.. I guess experimentation is needed to find the optimal!
Once stacked, I then imported into Affinity Photo and did a series of gentle curves, high-pass filters, unsharp masks, shadows and highlights to try and bring out the features and make it look sharp. I think I was somewhat successful....
The video's are not bright enough I think, and lack initial contrast so I need to figure that out. I captured using SharpCap 4.0, but it was really my first attempt at it. And then working through Affinity will need some time for practice as well.
Anyway, I am reasonably happy with this first attempt in a long, long while. Having got the Cassegrain for lunar planetary imaging, I really need to get it properly set up so I can use for such!!
