Moonlit

I haven't been too busy updating this blog with new photos. Not because I haven't been active atking any, but processing takes too much time. And I have been busy doing other stuff. But yesterday, I took a mosaic image of the Moon. It was high in the sky, and at a phase where you can see a lot of reliefs of craters and mountains. Casting shadows across the surface. I love that way better than a full moon. When it is full, the surface remains flat. Lifeless. But add a lot of shadows, and it is a completely different picture. Literally.
I made a composite of images, and stitched them together with Microsoft ICE. That is, ICE wasn't quite working the way it should this time. I don't know what threw it off, but for some reason, it refused to add one of the images, so I got a gap in the image. I had to add that in Gimp afterwards.
Tech data : William Optics 98FLT with 4x Televue Powermate. ASI178MC 2x2  binning. 1000 exposures of 4ms per image. 13 images in total. SharpCap for recording. AS!3 for stacking. Microsoft ICE for stiching. Registax for wavelets and Gimp for touchups. To view the full version, (4500 pixels tall) click on the image, then rightclick on the image and choose View Image. Then you can zoom in to see it all.

In addition, not far from the Moon, Venus was lighting up the skies. And I slewed the telescope to the planet. Using a ASI178MM (monochrome), no binning and 0.2mS exposures. 5000 of them. AS!3 picked 20% of the best, and I did a little wavelet sharpening. This was the result :