A Full Moon

It’s been ages since I’ve photographed a full moon. In the summer the moon isn’t up until late at night, but in the fall the moon is up at a more reasonable time. Recently I took the opportunity to try for a really crisp view of the moon.

I took short videos, aiming for at least 500 frames, of each section of the moon. After 16 videos I had covered the whole moon. Stacking was tricky because I was hand pointing the telescope, and the edges of the stacked images weren’t perfect. Also, I don’t have a photoshop subscription and my images are combined in Windows Photo Gallery, not the best choice.

For each of the 16 individual images I stacked them in autostakkert and then sharpened with wavelets in registax. I tried to be reasonable with the wavelets because it’s easy to make the moon look cartoonish if you go too far with it. Once the image was fully stitched together I adjusted some levels in darktable.

This is a fun image, but there are definitely some issues with the photo stitching and stacking when you zoom in. It may not be perfect, but the moon is always a beautiful thing to see in such detail!