Gibbous Moon

While often seen as the bane of deep-sky imagers, our moon can still provide a fertile testing-ground for many pieces of deep-sky imaging kit.
The moon will quickly reveal poorly corrected optics, any false colour and less than prefect baffling.

The above image was captured with a Takahashi FSQ106 fitted with the 645 wide field 0.72 reducer.
The field of view with a KAF16803 sensor is impressive. 5.53 x 5.53 degrees

But what is absent in the lunar image above speaks volumes. Look closely at the lunar limb.

The contrast is razor-sharp and there is simply no colour fringing.

Even more remarkable is the focal length was a mere 380mm or so,
yet the details seen in this image is more typical of telescopes with focal lenghts of over 1000mm.

A 20mp QHY183c colour CMOS camera running at 6 fps was used to capture the best 150 frames from a 600 frame imaging run.
Processing was kept to a minimum faihtfully capture the subtle colours of our earth's natural satellite.

Copyright Peter J Ward 2020

Can you see all 26 grey scales above?