A colorful moon

Conditions: acquired during poor seeing (~4.5 arcsec) from Denmark on my birthday, Dec. 12 -2005. No haze, no clouds.

Setup: Borg 100ED F6.4 refractor, DF-2 focusser, CFW-8 filter wheel, H-alpha, OIII, H-beta filters, SBIG ST10XE camera, Takahashi EM-10 mount

Exposure time: 0.01-0.02 sec (1x1 binning)

Processing (Mira, CCDDOS, MaximDL, Registar, Photoshop): selected sharpest frame out of ten exposures, dark subtracted, flat fielded, color-balanced, registered, combined as LRGB(OIII,Ha,OIII,Hb), increased color saturation 840%, smoothed colors, adjusted hue, sharpened, cropped

Our moon is typically regarded as a grey world, however very subtle color variations do exist and these I have illustrated in this compound image made through narrowband H-alpha (red), OIII (green) and H-beta (blue) filters. Narrowband filters were used to lower the image brightness sufficiently to avoid saturation of the CCD camera. During processing the color saturation was boosted more than 800%!


Here's my main page where you can see more of the pictures I have taken so far.


Comments greatly appreciated! (mikael@leif.org)