Moon at First Quarter on 03 April 2017
After a miserably cloudy winter, spring is back with a vengence, with some nice clear evenings. Last night, the weather cleared up at the same time as the moon was well-placed for some imaging.
The moon was at exactly First Quarter, and therefore, 50% illuminated.
The image is a composition of 9 monochrome images, without filters, taken between 22:33 and 22:51. Each image was stacked from 30 second videos comprising around 500 frames each, using between 25 and 50 percent of the best frames per video, depending on the image quality, resulting in a total of around 2000 frames being used in hte complete mosaic.
The seeing was rather turbulent, especially towards the end of the session, when the moon started disappearing behind my chimney, but I was able to get some decent results, none-the-less.
The images were stacked using Autostakkert, and then manipulated with Registax 6, finally stitching them together, and applying some filters using Gimp.
(Click on image for full size - 2500x2500 pixels)
Taken with a ZWO ASI120MM camera attached to a Sky Watcher 200 PDS Explorer 8” mounted on a HEQ-5 motorised equatorial mount.