[noelcmn]

[wtlwdwgn]

Worm Moon, 3/27/21 (or 27/3/21). K-3 and D FA 150-450.

[mattb123]

Worm Moon through Natural Arch (x-post)
K-1ii & D FA 70-200/2.8

[Canada_Rockies]

Worm Moon through Natural Arch (x-post)
K-1ii & D FA 70-200/2.8

Neat shot, Matt. Well done.

[mattb123]

Neat shot, Matt. Well done.

Thanks!

[wtlwdwgn]

Worm Moon again tonight lower in the sky with atmospheric haze and clouds. K-3 and D FA 150-450.

[shiner]

KP, DA300, 1.4x

[Eye.n.Eye]

I recently came across an older Tamron mirror lens (55BB 500mm F/8) for a great price. My initial reaction was; what can I do with an old, slow, soft, manual focus lens? In its defense, it looked nice and I appreciated the 350 degree focus throw and compact size. I decided, why not double down (literally) and get an equally cheap, era correct 2x teleconverter and shot the moon!

Below is my first effort with my new "$50 moon setup" on a KP body. Overall, its a 1000mm F/16 setup, however the transmission was even slower, more like T20+ in actual use. I tried my hardest earlier this week in my backyard, stacking the best 300 frames out 1150 captured. It was a painstaking process, both in the capture stage and in post, and the results are below.

Ultimately, I don't think the outcome made all the efforts worth it, but it was engaging exercise none-the-less. At the very least, I've learnt a lot about more about lunar imaging that I can apply in the future with better camera/lens setups.

I don't think I quite maxed out the performance of the Tamron mirrror lens, and I'm tempted to try again in the middle of winter with the moon more directly overhead, or without the teleconverter. I'm hesitant though, as the limiting factor will still be the slow capture speed of the Pentax KP (low frame rate, low buffer). I think I'll instead try a landscape image with an interesting moon alignment as the next outing for this lens.

[taks]

one from Feb. We had cloud cover for the worm moon.

[wtlwdwgn]

I recently came across an older Tamron mirror lens (55BB 500mm F/8) for a great price. My initial reaction was; what can I do with an old, slow, soft, manual focus lens? In its defense, it looked nice and I appreciated the 350 degree focus throw and compact size. I decided, why not double down (literally) and get an equally cheap, era correct 2x teleconverter and shot the moon!

Below is my first effort with my new "$50 moon setup" on a KP body. Overall, its a 1000mm F/16 setup, however the transmission was even slower, more like T20+ in actual use. I tried my hardest earlier this week in my backyard, stacking the best 300 frames out 1150 captured. It was a painstaking process, both in the capture stage and in post, and the results are below.

Ultimately, I don't think the outcome made all the efforts worth it, but it was engaging exercise none-the-less. At the very least, I've learnt a lot about more about lunar imaging that I can apply in the future with better camera/lens setups.

I don't think I quite maxed out the performance of the Tamron mirrror lens, and I'm tempted to try again in the middle of winter with the moon more directly overhead, or without the teleconverter. I'm hesitant though, as the limiting factor will still be the slow capture speed of the Pentax KP (low frame rate, low buffer). I think I'll instead try a landscape image with an interesting moon alignment as the next outing for this lens.

That's a nice sharp image from that combo.

[ecostigny]

I recently came across an older Tamron mirror lens (55BB 500mm F/8) for a great price. My initial reaction was; what can I do with an old, slow, soft, manual focus lens? In its defense, it looked nice and I appreciated the 350 degree focus throw and compact size. I decided, why not double down (literally) and get an equally cheap, era correct 2x teleconverter and shot the moon!

Below is my first effort with my new "$50 moon setup" on a KP body. Overall, its a 1000mm F/16 setup, however the transmission was even slower, more like T20+ in actual use. I tried my hardest earlier this week in my backyard, stacking the best 300 frames out 1150 captured. It was a painstaking process, both in the capture stage and in post, and the results are below.

Ultimately, I don't think the outcome made all the efforts worth it, but it was engaging exercise none-the-less. At the very least, I've learnt a lot about more about lunar imaging that I can apply in the future with better camera/lens setups.

I don't think I quite maxed out the performance of the Tamron mirrror lens, and I'm tempted to try again in the middle of winter with the moon more directly overhead, or without the teleconverter. I'm hesitant though, as the limiting factor will still be the slow capture speed of the Pentax KP (low frame rate, low buffer). I think I'll instead try a landscape image with an interesting moon alignment as the next outing for this lens.

Commendable results considering the age of the equipment and the amount of work that went into this. Have you considered writing an article about your process, showing how stacking can improve on the results from a single, suboptimal image?

[Eye.n.Eye]

Commendable results considering the age of the equipment and the amount of work that went into this. Have you considered writing an article about your process, showing how stacking can improve on the results from a single, suboptimal image?

Thank you. The good news is that 95% of the editing can be done in freeware programs that are pretty user friendly. Aside from Photoshop to do some final touches and blend in the moon glow and stars, I used RawTherappe for raw development, then PIPP to centre the moon for stacking, Autostakkert for stacking, and Registax for wavelet sharpening.

The basic premise is to create a single moon photo of very high SNR, so you can aggressively sharpen it without introducing artefacts.

This video is a thorough guide:

You Tube

You Tube

If anything is unclear or you get stuck, PM me, and I can help you out.

My photo was only so tricky to edit because the long focal length, combined with the slow shooting speed of the KP. This meant I had to re-centre the moon manually 40 times. In short, this created more rotation from start to finish than Autoskattert could correct for. So I manually de-rotated the moon in the raw development stage for all 1200 photos, taking a long time. If you can take say 200 photos to stack at a shorter focal length without moving the camera once, you could probably skip straight to the Autostakkert stage of the above video.

[schnitzer79]

Tamron 70-200 with 1.7xTC

[MossyRocks]

The basic premise is to create a single moon photo of very high SNR, so you can aggressively sharpen it without introducing artefacts.

It isn't just sharpening that one can really bang on when doing big stacks. Things like contrast, saturation, and even image size (if doing a super res combination) can all be pushed pretty hard when you start getting lots of shots in a stack.

Aside from Photoshop to do some final touches and blend in the moon glow and stars, I used RawTherappe for raw development, then PIPP to centre the moon for stacking, Autostakkert for stacking, and Registax for wavelet sharpening.

Out of curiosity have you played around with the RawTherapee feature in the sharpening tab that has the contrast by levels sliders, or in the advanced tab where there are a whole bunch of wavelet editing options?
I will usually stack and align images using Hugin using the GUI for alignment and setting the remapping but then for combining the remapped aligned images I will use the command line tools like hugin_stacker or enfuse as there are so many more options there for combining shots.

I hadn't heard of PIPP (Planetary Imaging PreProcessor) but it looks like it may be a good option to add to my workflow for moon and other solar system object shots. The option to auto toss some bad shots would be a nice feature that I don't currently have.

[Eye.n.Eye]

It isn't just sharpening that one can really bang on when doing big stacks. Things like contrast, saturation, and even image size (if doing a super res combination) can all be pushed pretty hard when you start getting lots of shots in a stack.

Yes 100%. Any processing that amplifies noise will definitely benefit from a higher SNR image as a starting point. I was just trying to convey that for this particular image, the amount of tone mapping I did was orders of magnitude less aggressive than the sharpening, with no colour adjustments, or drizzling.

Out of curiosity have you played around with the RawTherapee feature in the sharpening tab that has the contrast by levels sliders, or in the advanced tab where there are a whole bunch of wavelet editing options?
I will usually stack and align images using Hugin using the GUI for alignment and setting the remapping but then for combining the remapped aligned images I will use the command line tools like hugin_stacker or enfuse as there are so many more options there for combining shots.

I hadn't heard of PIPP (Planetary Imaging PreProcessor) but it looks like it may be a good option to add to my workflow for moon and other solar system object shots. The option to auto toss some bad shots would be a nice feature that I don't currently have.

Yes, I believe the wavelet editing in the advanced tab could provide an analogous output to wavelet sharpening in Registax. When I was playing with it I got confused though (as is typical when I use a new function in RawTherapee for the first time haha), so I reverted to a saved sharpening profile in Registax.

I haven't used Hugin for image stacking, but I have used PTgui fairly extensively for 360 image stitching. I understand it uses the same stitching/aligning engine as Hugin. It is very very robust at aligning images via uniform geometric transformation. That said, I'm confident the aligning engine in Autostakkert will blow it out of the water when it comes to warping/skewing an image locally for the specific case of correcting atmospheric distortion. I understand my image falls a long way short of demonstrating this, but that is a limitation on the optics rather than the stacking accuracy.

Excluding some percentage of 'bad images" is fundamental to the process of Lucky Imaging. Both PIPP and Autoskattert can quality grade the individual frames, so you can skip the PIPP step altogether if you prefer. I like the visualisation options of PIPP personally.