A little over quarter

Post by **rcj** » Thu Oct 25, 2007 3:36 pm

Hi all,

Here is a recent lunar mosaic taken for the first time using the 5-inch refractor and the Toucam, together with the 1.6X Ext-Q matched barlow.

It's also time to clean the Toucam!:oops:

mrngbss · Post by **mrngbss** » Thu Oct 25, 2007 3:46 pm

At such clarity, the TouCam is really at its best. Why did you say need to clean the camera? byt, how many video frames (average) per mosaic did you use to stack ?

cataclysm · Post by **cataclysm** » Thu Oct 25, 2007 5:32 pm

Wow! The details!!

Clifford60 · Post by **Clifford60** » Thu Oct 25, 2007 8:37 pm

Wooooooooooooooooooooooooow

Post by **Airconvent** » Thu Oct 25, 2007 10:59 pm

excellent contrast and details!

mySG_jy · Post by **mySG_jy** » Fri Oct 26, 2007 1:01 pm

what is the setting and what is the software did you use? I try to use Toucam with my 6SE it just able to take a small portion of the moon, can't get the full moon into 1 picture. is there some settings that i have to change? i used the software that comes with the toucam.

vhuang168 · Post by **vhuang168** » Fri Oct 26, 2007 1:03 pm

mySG_jy wrote:what is the setting and what is the software did you use? I try to use Toucam with my 6SE it just able to take a small portion of the moon, can't get the full moon into 1 picture. is there some settings that i have to change? i used the software that comes with the toucam.

Its a mosaic, meaning he took many pictures of parts of the moon and pieced together this picture.

Post by **rcj** » Fri Oct 26, 2007 1:38 pm

mySG_jy wrote:what is the setting and what is the software did you use? I try to use Toucam with my 6SE it just able to take a small portion of the moon, can't get the full moon into 1 picture. is there some settings that i have to change? i used the software that comes with the toucam.

yes, Vincent is right. It was mentioned in the description header as well. Lunar mosaics are fun to make and utilises the scope's potential to have enough resolution to bring out the fine details on the lunar surface, and yet offer to present the moon in its entirety at the same time. Such pictures can be printed out modestly big on paper at photographic resolution at the same time. You should try it out the next time. I am using IRIS to capture each segment of the moon, in an AVI video lasting 10 seconds each. I wish I could go longer, but my PIII laptop is lacking of space already. Each file about 67MB. There are about 25 plus segments here. Each segment video file is then gone through processing in Registax software, with selectively choosing the best 70 frames to stack forming a resultant stacked segment frame. These 25 plus resulting frames that shows the moon in different areas are then imported to Photoshop on my mac for mosaicing. I do not have enough confidence to trust auto-merge mosaic software, since I like to manually tweak the frames in Photoshop until everything is pieced up seamlessly. Sometimes you have to do a minute rotation of each frame as you go along and realise they don't merge well (without rotation tweaking). Also, it is best to take the entire session in as short a time as possible, so that rotation tweaking will be kept to a minimum as well as having a consistent sky transparency condition. Actually the above moon mosaic was taken when the sky was not even dark yet, deep blue hue, but I try to save and minimize the video file by taking in grayscale.

Meng Lee · Post by **Meng Lee** » Fri Oct 26, 2007 2:38 pm

Hey Remus, embed the original picture here! don't embed the downsampled one! Hehe.

zackae · Post by **zackae** » Sat Oct 27, 2007 6:26 pm

Wow.. no yellow..