Crescent Moon

This Moon crescent kept us company for much of the evening during our last field night. It set at 10 pm, giving us a couple of hours of darkness. We are heading for a Full Moon on Saturday, so I don’t expect to do any more deep sky imaging for a week or two, although I have one final image left to post from last week.

The Moon is always fun to shoot, especially as a crescent, so I took this image during twilight, before the sky was dark enough for deep sky imaging.

The image is  a stack of the best 250 of 500 video frames and as I was set up for deep sky imaging, I had my light pollution filter in place instead of a moon filter. Probably that was not a good idea for lunar shots – but it is what it is.

The video was processed in PIPP and converted to AVI, before stacking the best 50% of frames in Autostackert and a final bit of sprucing up in GIMP.

Object Details:

Apparent size:  32.7′
Age: New Moon + 4 days.
Visual magnitude:  -7.7
Illumination: 21.0%
Altitude during exposure:  34°

Did You Know?

The Moon’s mass is 1.23% of Earth and it’s surface gravity is 16.54% that of Earth.

 

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Here is some technical stuff.

Image: Frames: best 50% of 500. Exposure:  0.065849 sec. Gain: 0 Date:  2019-09-03 Location:  semi-dark rural. Cropping:   Yes

Processing: Image acquisition:  SharpCap. Method:  video. Video conversion:  PIPP. Image stacking:  Autostackert. Image post-processing:  GIMP.

Gear:

Telescope:	SkyWatcher Esprit	Type:	120ED triplet refractor
Focal:	840 mm F/7	Mount:	SkyWatcher EQ6-R Pro
Camera:	ZWO ASI 071 MC Pro	Type:	CMOS 28.4mm 16 Mpx
Optical aids:	Flattener: Y; filter: LP

Geek Log:

[ZWO ASI071MC Pro] Debayer Preview=On Pan=0 Tilt=0 Output Format=SER file (*.ser) Binning=1 Capture Area=4944×3284 Colour Space=RAW16 Hardware Binning=Off Turbo USB=40 Flip=None Frame Rate Limit=1 every 2 seconds Gain=0 Exposure=0.065849 Timestamp Frames=Off White Bal (B)=50 White Bal (R)=53 Brightness=16 Temperature=-13.5 Cooler Power=78

Target Temperature=-15 Cooler=On Auto Exp Max Gain=300 Auto Exp Max Exp M S=30000 Auto Exp Target Brightness=100 Mono Bin=Off Anti Dew Heater=Off Banding Threshold=35 Banding Suppression=0 Apply Flat=None Subtract Dark=None #Black Point Display Black Point=0 #MidTone Point Display MidTone Point=0.5 #White Point Display White Point=1 TimeStamp=2019-09-03T08:59:29.7492710Z SharpCapVersion=3.2.6086.0

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Image © Roger Powell

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