Imaging the MOON ~ Progress Update

Last night I figured I'd try my hand at grabbing frames from a tracked moon video I just took using the Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer camera mount to stack and create a master image. The mount was only quickly polar aligned by sight for this exercise. Our atmosphere is constantly in motion, it is a mixture of gases, water vapour, dust and other suspended particles. All these impact on the ability to receive light and to clearly resolve an image. This atmospheric distortion is demonstrated in the video below (best seen full screen). This distortion is also the reason stars twinkle in the sky.

I hadn't tried this method before so I was keen to see the result. 1500 frames were grabbed from a .mov video taken with the Nikon P900 using a program called PIPP (Planetary Imaging PreProcessor) and an .avi file was then created from these frames. PIPP is a Windows application designed for pre-processing planetary images/video before stacking them with image stacking software. None of the stacking software I have found supports .mov format which is the native format the Nikon P900 outputs video in, hence the reason to convert it to .avi format before going to the next step in the procedure. 

This avi file was loaded into another program called Registax, an image processing program released as freeware for ameteur astrophotographers. The individual frames were aligned, then the best 5% of them (selected by registax) were stacked to create a clearer master image of the chosen video frames by averaging out the pixels. This master image was then post processed in another program called Gimp 2 (the poor man's Photoshop substitute) where a few small changes were made and the image was cropped and saved as a Portable Network Graphics file (.PNG).

The next step in this exercise will be to take a hundred or so images along with some dark frames etc and stack them to compare the results of using either captured video or still images as the source to create a final image. I suspect still images will yield better results due to the much higher resolution.

I'm starting to get the hang of the workflow now to improve final image quality. Still lots to learn and a long way to go yet but i'm pleased to report that progress is being made and I am very happy with this result. The software used for processing this image are free to use (PIPP, Registax and GIMP 2) but I think I'll take the plunge and get a license for Lightroom/Photoshop at some time in the future to see if I can get to the next level in post processing.

Tycho Crater right of center

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tycho_(lunar_crater)

https://www.factslides.com/s-Moon