Finally A Break In The Clouds To See The Moon

This spring has been brutal, I haven’t been able to take the telescope out in ages. There have been clouds for weeks. I haven’t taken a picture in over a month!

I only had a short time to get a picture of the moon before more clouds rolled in, but I wanted to try a new technique.

Normally when I take a picture of the moon I need to take a couple pictures and photo stitch them together, but this time I wanted to take multiple pictures and stack them together for each image in the photo stitch.

In the end I made a stitch with 5 images, I also made the same stitch again but each image was a stack of roughly 30 photos. The idea was that the stacking would make the whole image much more crisp and clear.

First up: the normal photo of 5 stitched images:

Photo stitch with 5 images - ISO 2000, shutter 1/60 sec, 2x barlow lens

And finally, the stitch with 5 images created by stacking ~30 photos each:

Stitch with 5 images, each a stack of ~30 pictures - ISO 2000, shutter 1/60 sec, 2x barlow lens

The stacked image is definitely clearer, but I don’t know if it’s the huge leap I was hoping for. Either way it’s nice to finally get back outside in the nice weather!