I was playing around with low tech astro ideas and learning some of the new photo processing techniques. Many questions have come up regarding "shooting the moon". I wanted to find out what I could do with a really simple setup.
Equipment: Canon D60, EF 35-350mm f3.5/f5.6 USM lens, shaky tripod, no mirror lockup, quick and dirty.
Exposure: 100ASA f5.6 at 1/350th of a second. I had (maybe) a 15 minute window before clouds and rain destroyed the viewing. Even so, many of these shots were taken thru a drifting cloud layer. I might have gotten only one shot with a pure clear hole to the moon.
Software: used: I used ASTROSTAX for my first time but will probably get IMAGES PLUS for future work.
Here are the two images that I finally arrived at.
First, From AstoStax:
Then: I just took my best image and ran it thru an unsharp mask in PhotoShop 7.
I don't think there is a major difference here. All that stacking effort really did not buy me much.
What follows is the grubby details of the process that I did and the raw images I was working from:
ASTROSTAX is limited to a 1024x1024 pixel image. The D60 produces a MUCH bigger image. So, my first step was to crop each image to a 500x500 pixel piece that included the whole moon. I had posted a question on how to do this and Sam Chng gave me some tips. Here is what I did to crop the images. NOTE: These images are the real 500x500 pixel piece that I was able to image with my D60 and the 350mm telephoto. This has not been enlarged in any way. Its the "raw" pixels that I captured.
1. Opened up a NEW file in photoshop sized to 500x500 pixels
2. Did a CTRL-A to select the WHOLE 500x500 area
3. Opened up an image I wanted to crop
4. Selected my new file again and dragged the Selection Window on top of the
image I wanted to crop.
if you keep your
mouse inside the "selection" area, you can drag it around to get a
good position.
I centered the selection
around the moon's image.
5. Now did an IMAGE -> CROP
6. SAVE AS in my working folder.
This was a real quick process to complete. Thanks Sam!
Here are the 4 (cropped) images I decided to work from.
