Contains:  Solar system body or event
My biggest Moon Mosaic yet!, ArvitZ

My biggest Moon Mosaic yet!

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging
My biggest Moon Mosaic yet!, ArvitZ

My biggest Moon Mosaic yet!

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

This mosaic is part of testing an old Celestron SPC8 from the 80s that I borrowed from my local astronomy club.
I am quite impressed of its performance on the moon, because I never had the opportunity to try lucky imaging through a scope this big before.

I had manually slewed my new mount to compose the mosaic, because I did this quite spontaneously. Obviously this was not optimal for a proper mosaic...
Then after capturing 145 GB of Moon panels I had the challenge to figure out the post processing workflow.
After stacking the best 200 frames of each panel with PSS, I started to stitch the mosaic by hand in GIMP... this was not possible for me without spending waay more time than I anticipated.
So I came up with some crazy plans, because I really liked the local normalization and mosaic blending features in APP:
I pretended to have "stars" (aka. little crater features) in my image and therefore I let APP stitch and normalize my whole panorama for me

app_moonMosaic.png

And it worked perfectly on the second try (the first one above still shows a gap and borders obviously)!
I never thought I could use APP as a powerful moon mosaic tool aswell, because I really did not want to install any Microsoft stuff on my linux desktop.

In the end this is my highest resolution image of the moon sofar!

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