[APML] OT: Lunar Mosaic

[Juan Conejero <skycad@ctv.es>]

Hello all,

Forgive me for this off-topic post, but I just wanted to share our last 
results. Mother Nature has gifted us with three unusually stable nights due 
to extremely humid air filling our valley directly from the Mediterranean 
Sea. Humidity was so high that we were forced to push our (home-made) dew 
protection system to its maximum power: 32 watts heating the metallic ring 
that holds the correcting plate of our S/C. Here you can see one of our 
first results: a mosaic of the lunar terminator built from 24 images:

http://www.pleiades-astrophoto.com/gallery/webcam/20030310/mosaic-VC(12,Gaussian(2.0,2.0)).3500.jpg

The camera is a Philips ToUCam Pro and the scope a Meade LX200 12" 
Schmidt-Cassegrain at prime focus (f/10). Each image is the integration of 
300 to 500 video frames captured, selected, aligned and averaged with 
K3CCDTools. The mosaic was constructed in Photoshop 6. Finally, we applied 
12 iterations of the Van Cittert deconvolution algorithm with a gaussian 
function of radius 2.0 taken as the PSF (own software). The above image has 
been reduced to 3500 pixels wide and weights 1.2 MB.

Here is the image prior deconvolution:

http://www.pleiades-astrophoto.com/gallery/webcam/20030310/mosaic.3500.jpg

This is our first "big" lunar mosaic, so it contains several errors. You 
can easily see some "patches" covering small areas were we missed data, and 
some limits between different frames are also too visible. Also, I think we 
must fine-tune deconvolution somewhat.

Comments are always welcome,
______________________________________
Juan Conejero, Pleiades Astrophoto
skycad@ctv.es
http://www.pleiades-astrophoto.com/en.html


_______________________________________________
Astro-Photo mailing list
Astro-Photo@seds.org
http://seds.org/mailman/listinfo/astro-photo