Following on from imaging Jenssen and Petavius craters (click here to see post), I moved on to collecting data for a waxing crescent moon (4 days old) mosaic of the illuminated area.  A combination of the camera chip size (DMK 21AU04.AS Mono, 1/4″ sensor at 640×480 pixels), and my need for an “extra large” overlap area between the panes resulted in a 54 pane mosaic being created.

I setup IC capture to collect 1000 frames for each pane at 60fps, leaving the exposure, gain and gamma settings the same for each pane (which made processing much easier later). All frames were captured using the DMK 21AU04.AS camera equipped with a Planet IR Pro 807nm IR pass filter, and imaged through an LX200R 12″ Meade SCT scope. Each pane was processed using identical workflow in AVIStack 2. The frames were assembled in Photoshop CS3 which was also used for small tweaks. On average, 350-400 frames were usable for each pane, resulting in the final image being constructed from over 20,000 frames.

The image below is a thumbnail of the resultant mosaic. Click on the thumbnail to be taken to a zoomable version in your browser. The zoom can be adjusted at 10% intervals up to the native (100%) of the image.

Just close the zoom window down when your finished to bring you back here.

Thanks for looking, Steve