An Inverted Moon

It feels like I haven't taken the telescope out in ages! Jupiter and Saturn are setting, we had a new moon, and I haven't had any good space station passes in a long time.

Yesterday I came home from work and noticed a sliver of moon hanging in a cloudless sky and thought I needed a picture of it. After the kids were in bed I quickly took the telescope out to catch it before it set behind the western trees.

This shot was a photo stitch of 4 images taken with a Fuji XA-2 mirrorless camera with 2x Barlow lens. I set the camera delay to 2 seconds to let any vibrations settle, and had it take 5 consecutive shots. The camera was set to ISO 2000 and a shutter speed of 1/125 seconds. Each of the 5 identical shots was stacked in autostakkert and slightly sharpened in registax with wavelets filters. Finally all 4 images were stitched in windows photo gallery and level adjusted in darktable. Being so low in the west the final image isn't as sharp as I'd like but it's still nice to look at.

I've seen people in the past color invert images of the moon and they always look surprisingly cool. I took my shot and inverted the colors in GIMP to produce this.

There was some additional level tweaking to get the inverted image to look pleasing and how I wanted it, but nothing crazy. I love how this one looks, it really makes those southern craters pop.

Before heading inside I figured I'd try to get a zoomed in image as well. To zoom in I added a 9mm lens into the T-adapter connecting the camera to the Barlow lens. I'm now looking at a moon low in the western sky through two different lenses, I didn't have much faith in a good outcome. The camera was set to ISO-12800 and shutter speed of 1/80 seconds.

Both PIPP and autostakkert had a hard time aligning the frames because they were so dark, do my first step was to lighten and color correct all the images in darktable first. Once the images were brighter with more contrast they were able to be successfully aligned in PIPP and stacked in autostakkert. Some sharpening was done in registax before doing final cropping and adjustments in darktable.

Big shout out to Google Earth for having a moon feature that let me figure out what I took a picture of!

I'm looking forward to getting the moon again when it's a bit higher in the sky!