The Moon
09 Oct 2023My wife has been nagging me for ages to take a pic of the Moon. I’d always pushed back because to be honest, I wasn’t at all interested. To me, it’s just a big source of light pollution for my deep space imaging. But, I relented. I pointed the camera at the moon at got 10mins worth of very short exposures. I didn’t even bother removing the nebula filter. The next day, I spent ages working out the correct workflow for planetary/lunar because it’s really quite different from deep space. I settled on using PIPP for cropping and converting to avi, feeding into Autostakkert for stacking. The big hurdle for me was getting PIPP/Autostakkert to accept my bayer FITS files. No matter what I didn, they wouldn’t debayer properly. Eventually, I used Siril to debayer my FITS prior to feeding into PIPP/Autostakkert which worked wonderfully. The end result isn’t too bad for my first attempt, even if I do say so myself. However, I’ve now been seduced by some of these “mineral” Moon pics I see online where they’re full of colour rather than being bland greyscale blobs, so I’ll be trying this again at the next full moon, but this time I will remove my nebula filter.
