Telescope: Meade Lightbridge 16 @ f/9 (OPT 2” 2x Barlow)
Camera: Canon Rebel T2i, 1.25” adapter, manual remote switch
Filter: None
Exposure: 5x1/250sec, ISO 800 saved as JPEG
Mirror Lock-up: On, 5 second pause to allow vibrations to settle
Software: Panorama Maker 3, Photoshop 7
This is my second attempt at imaging the moon with my Lightbridge 16 and my first attempt at a full-disk mosaic. Unfortunately, I goofed and didn’t realize until it was too late that I had my camera set to save the images as low resolution JPEGs instead of RAW images. Fortunately, at this images scale it didn’t hurt too much, but I definitely need to try this again. The overall procedure was fairly simple. I set the focus visually looking through the viewfinder at a bright star (Rigel) and a homemade Bahtinov mask. I then moved over to the moon and took a set of test images of the brightest region to set the exposure time and gain so that the histogram was about 80% filled. I then took a series of 5 images with enough overlap to assemble the mosaic. These were stitched together in Panorama Maker 3, rotated, cropped, and final processing in PS7.
-John
