[Fdooch]

[Weevil]

My most recent full disk moon only shot and some explanation:


Capture
I used my K-3iii since this was the first night out. It was really windy and the moon was huge so I didn't chase any deep sky objects so instead chased the moon.
Lens: SMC A* 400mm f/2.8 ED [IF] + SMC A 2X-L converter
ISO 200
1/200s
f/11 (f/5.6+converter)
Total images captured 718
Had the camera in electronich shutter mode and would shoot a burst until I filled the buffer then wait for it to clear the buffer. Shoot some more. After 3 buffers worth of shots I would reframe and repeat.

Raw Development
I use RawTherapee. Here I turned off capture sharpening and used a debayering algorithm of RCD+VNG4 with the maximum false color surpression steps.
I did a little bit of the contrast by level adjustments to add a bit more pop to the craters but it was very mild at this point.
I did a 2x up scaling using nearest neighbor method.
All 718 images were developed to 16bit tifs

Stacking:
First I fed the 718 images into PIPP to sort by quality, trim them to 4500x4500, and do initial alignment.
The best 200 images were then loaded into Hugin where final alignment and remapping was performed to produce very well aligned images
The 200 aligned images output from Hugin were then stacked with the program enfuse with exposure-weight set to .1 saturation-weight set to .1 contrast weight set to 1 contrast-window-size set to 9, and gray-projector set to "l-star".

Final editing:
Opened the resulting stack in RawTherapee:
Upped the saturation some to give a slight mineral moon look
Played around with the contrast by level settings in the detail section to add some more pop to the craters
Exported to a 16bit tiff
Opened the 16bit tiff in GIMP
Created 3 duplicate layers and used the high pass filter on each one with a blend mode of soft light. The settings for each layer were:
duplicate layer 1 std. dev 4 contrast 2.5
duplicate layer 2 std. dev. 10 contrast 1.8
duplicate layer 3 std. dev. 26 contrast 1.3
All of the layers that had the highpass filter applied I did the noise reduction filter on them with the noise reduction set to 32. This really helps remove any noise or unnatural crunchiness when viewing the find details.
The base layer I also applied an unsharp mask with a radius of 2.1 and an amount of 1.7

From there I just resized to 1200 pixels along the tall edge and output to jpg.

Ho wow! 718 frames!
I wouln't have imagined that much work to get this image... good job!

[cooks333]

My most recent full disk moon only shot and some explanation...

Thanks for all the details, Mossy. Impressive workflow to produce an excellent image full of detail. Good to know that the rabbit hole for true astrophotography technique goes very deep and offers so many possibilities.

I am at the complete other end of the experience spectrum and made my first ever composite image last week of the full moon rising over the McDowell Mountains. The outskirts of north Scottsdale go right up to the base of the mountains and the views from Phoenix are awesome if you can get some elevation (I took this from close to the top of Mummy Mountain). K1-II + DA*300mm uncropped.

[paulh]

[MossyRocks]

I wouln't have imagined that much work to get this image... good job!

The K-3iii is really fast with a rather large buffer and it clears it fast so capturing it didn't take that long. the rest of it is mostly using tools that make life easy. For raw development in rawTherapee I just edit 1 image and copy the processing options to the rest. PIPP sorts and crops them all automatically once loaded so it is fairly quick. Hugin again works wonders for doing the final fine alignment and outputting remapped images. Using enfuse again is pretty automatic once you understand it. Final editing in RawTherapee and GIMP to get the most out of it actually takes more of my time than most things but even that wasn't that long. I've done this before so I have a reasonable feel for things and have a good idea how to avoid things going sideways.

[MossyRocks]

I am at the complete other end of the experience spectrum and made my first ever composite image last week of the full moon rising over the McDowell Mountains. The outskirts of north Scottsdale go right up to the base of the mountains and the views from Phoenix are awesome if you can get some elevation (I took this from close to the top of Mummy Mountain). K1-II + DA*300mm uncropped.

I still like that image a lot. by composite do you mean 2 shots one exposed for the moon and another exposed for the rest of the scene or was this one of those shots where the moon was pasted in to create something new.

[cooks333]

I still like that image a lot. by composite do you mean 2 shots one exposed for the moon and another exposed for the rest of the scene or was this one of those shots where the moon was pasted in to create something new.

Thanks. And the former in terms of what I mean by composite. I brought two properly exposed images with the same framing into Photoshop as separate layers (moon image as background) and then effectively removed everything above the mountains in the city lights layer so that the dark sky and properly exposed moon show through.

[MossyRocks]

Thanks. And the former in terms of what I mean by composite. I brought two properly exposed images with the same framing into Photoshop as separate layers (moon image as background) and then effectively removed everything above the mountains in the city lights layer so that the dark sky and properly exposed moon show through.

Ok that is what I was hoping. I don't like the made up images where things aren't where they are suppose to be.

[Weevil]

I don't like the made up images where things aren't where they are suppose to be.

Well, sometimes, the camera images cannot always render the way humans see things, so if that's done with that in mind, I think it can be acceptable... but that depends on each person's values...

Anr example of acceptable stacking in Photoshop IMO, is when someone does a starfield with the astrotracer, the object or horizon area on earth always get blurry, so here I'd say it's not a problem to take a separate shot of the surrounding areas to merge them on PP.

[MossyRocks]

Well, sometimes, the camera images cannot always render the way humans see things, so if that's done with that in mind, I think it can be acceptable... but that depends on each person's values...Anr example of acceptable stacking in Photoshop IMO, is when someone does a starfield with the astrotracer, the object or horizon area on earth always get blurry, so here I'd say it's not a problem to take a separate shot of the surrounding areas to merge them on PP.

That is acceptable. What I meant by made up imgaes are the ones where someone takes a moon shot and pasts it in an image where they are facing the wrong direction and the moon would never be there, or like some of the milky way shots I've seen people make where they have it showing over Minneapolis from the 24th ave bridge. Combining images to capture more range like a foreground and moon is fine, stacking to drive down noise in astro shots, panoramas, other interesting computational techniques I find acceptable it is just the made up composites that I don't like.

[UncleVanya]

That is acceptable. What I meant by made up imgaes are the ones where someone takes a moon shot and pasts it in an image where they are facing the wrong direction and the moon would never be there, or like some of the milky way shots I've seen people make where they have it showing over Minneapolis from the 24th ave bridge. Combining images to capture more range like a foreground and moon is fine, stacking to drive down noise in astro shots, panoramas, other interesting computational techniques I find acceptable it is just the made up composites that I don't like.

I’m in the same camp as you. I’m tolerant of composites that don’t masquerade as reality but when they attempt to pull the wool over our eyes I get cranky.

[Weevil]

I’m in the same camp as you. I’m tolerant of composites that don’t masquerade as reality but when they attempt to pull the wool over our eyes I get cranky.

I think we are one the same page all..
those other composite requires advanced photoshop knowledge, which I dont have.

[Pelto]

Fantastic footage of our moon. Very beautiful i think. Take a look:
https://www.space.com/40274-nasa-moon-in-4k-video-tour.html

[wtlwdwgn]

Tonight's moon through thin cloud cover with the K-3 and DFA 150-450, 1/400 @ ƒ5.6, ISO 800.

[MetteHHH]

Here is a slightly different moon shot. I was visiting my brother's house i Tampa while the moon was full, and while the moon was about to set and a lot of birds became active, I thought I might be able to catch a moon-flyover. So I stopped down to f10 with enough light for ISO 640 / 1/1000 sec, aimed and hoped - and this white ibis was collaborative.

Not technically impressive maybe, but it made me happy!

22-02-17Moon