I had a go at some Lunar using my IMG 132E camera.  I spent around 4 hours in the cold getting to grips with the software and settings and practising focusing but I think it paid off.  Before now, I hadn’t really spent the time to learn the camera or the software, too focused on DSO imaging.

So here is a 4 panel mosaic from the 19th April 2013.

For each panel, the best 40% frames out of 1,000 frame AVI were used running at approx 18 fps.  The resolution of the AVI was 1280 x 1024, which is large!  I did experiment with 640×480 which ran at approx 60 fps but I need to revisit that.  I understand there are merits for high frame rate, but I think that may be more important for Plantary imaging rather than Lunar.  I’ll give it another go next time the moon is out over the Summer.

Processing was done in Autostakkert! and Registax 6, with a little post processing in Adobe Photoshop for final touches and saving to JPG.

01:30 – On a night with heavy Aurora activity the Moon occults Jupiter.  In typical English fashion we were graced with the usual weather so saw neither. Surprised?  Not really.  I think I need to go to the Doctors I must have Cataracts it surely cannot be this cloudy permanently!

03:44 – The clouds have actually parted, clear skies and brilliant views of Jupiter grazing the moon.  Venus is rising nice from my visible horizon.  Got a few pics and a video to look at tomorrow.

Invested in some spacers and I think I have managed to get rid of most of my elongated stars issue with the QHY8L.  I was also graced with some clear skies for a few hours so I put the Atik 314L+ to work on the 80 ED and the QHY8L on the 100 ED to try my first ever HaRGB, which is a combination of Ha data with RGB.  So the Atik 314L+ was shooting mono through my 7NM Ha filter and the QHY8L to handle the RGB in one go (it’s a one shot colour a.k.a. OSC).

Got to say I am quite pleased with the result considering how much data I used in the final process.

Image Details

Subs: 5 x 600s from QHY8L on 100ED & 5 x 600s from Atik 314L+ on 80ED
Processing: Calibrated and stacked in PixInsight, post processing in PixInsight and CS5.
Kit: SW 100 ED DS Pro and 80 ED DS Pro on HEQ5 Guided with QHY5 Finder Guider.  Imaged with QHY8L OSC cooled to -15 and Atik 314L+ mono with Ha 7NM filter cooled to -10

RGB

Ha

Ha RGB Combination

After some more analysis at the individual subs for M13 taken on the 12th May 2012 it is apparent that their is trailing in the stars due to poor guiding.  This combined with poor focus (which could be a result of tracking errors) and poor seeing I think has resulted in a lower quality image, lacking colour and sharp detail.  The image itself is still good in my opinion, but I was expecting better.

Take a look at the image here, this is a crop from the top left of a sub, stretched so you can see it.  I know this isn’t my usual spacing issue as the stars are not elongated toward the middle of the image (they would be stretched toward the bottom right in this image) but instead they are rotational.

I knew I had a balancing issue due to adding more kit to the mount and not correctly balancing it, this was shown also in the PHD graph which was far from flat at times.  Unfortunately, due to rushing and trying to make use of the only clear sky in months I wasted it with these mistakes.  I know for next time.  Until then, clear skies!