Full Moon on 22 March 2016
It has been overcast for the last week, but a few nights ago, I was working late into the night for work, when while waiting for a job to run, I noticed that the cloud cover had thinned out a bit revealing the almost-full moon.
The moon was covered in light clouds but was shining through, so took out my telescope, and managed to take a number of videos of the moon behind the clouds. This is about as bad seeing as you can get with actually being able to see anything, with many of the frames in the videos ranging from overexposed to barely visible as the clouds moved over the moon’s disk. The videos were taken over a time span of 5 minutes, before the clouds got too thick to do any more imaging.
Out of the usable video, I stacked the best quality frames using Autostakkert 2.6.1, followed by applying wavelet filters using Registax 6. I got 9 usable images out of the stacking, comprising an average stack of about 30 frames per image, which I then finally stitched it all together in Gimp to create the mosaic.
What was a real challenge, is that due to the huge variance in the seeing, each image in the mosaic was a different brightness, so I had play around with the contrast and the blending of the images to get it to stich together well.
There were two small gaps in my mosaic, which I filled in by stitching in pieces from the full moon image created by Fred Locklear on 2013-5-25 which you can find at https://www.flickr.com/photos/zamb0ni/8874270432/.
Below are the two images - one with only my images showing the gaps, and the other with the filler image to complete the moon.
(Click on images for full size)
Taken with a ZWO ASI120MM camera attached to a Sky Watcher 200 PDS Explorer 8” mounted on a HEQ-5 motorised equatorial mount.