With my scope back together after major surgery, I wanted to give it a thorough test. But the moon was high, and rain was expected early morning, so I settled on a bit of lunar imaging. This is also my first try at using a small CCTV camera lens on a ZWO camera to collimate the telescope; I believe it has worked very well. I began by using my deep sky camera, the ASI2600MC with coma corrector. This camera yields an image scale of 0.65 arcseconds per pixel, which works out to about ¾ of a mile per pixel on the moon’s surface. Its field of view is such to fit the entire moon. The seeing wasn’t half bad, so I took a few sets of 750 images. One set was clearly best, so I stacked the best 25% of frames from it. The 67% waxing gibbous full disk,
Since it did not take too long to take this data, I decided to try for a bit more. I fetched my planetary camera, the ASI183MC and an Orion 2x barlow. This combination gives about 0.2 arcseconds per pixel, or about ¼ of a mile per pixel on the moon’s surface. While this is below the theoretical resolution of my telescope, deconvolution with a point spread function produced from a star image recovered a lot of detail and produced decently sharp images. I took 8 panels of what I thought were interesting locations on the moon. Each panel was the best 25% of frames from a 1000 frame sequence. After preparing them all for processing, I noted that many of them overlapped. I started toying around with dynamic alignment and mosaic combination in PixInsight and decided to settle on two mosaics composed of two and three panels, respectively. For my first attempt at high resolution lunar imaging and mosaics, I am quite pleased.
