How To Capture and Process a Mineral Moon

[Music] [Music] hi everyone my name is Joe I am the digital astronomer and today I want to show you how to capture stack and process a mineral moon like this okay so that's what we're going to try to produce today and I'm going to show you how we do that in three steps number one I want to talk to you about how we capture the video that I use to make that we're going to show you in short cap how to capture a short video of the moon then we're going to take that picture in the second step and stack it using a little program a free program called Auto stackert then we're going to process the picture in Photoshop to bring out the color so let's get started let me show you how to capture a video of the moon all right I'm gonna show you how I capture my lunar pictures real quick I've got everything centered up here obviously on the moon in short cap and what I've got set here is because of the focal ratio and stuff on my telescope I can capture the entire you know sphere of the moon so I've got it set on raw 16 normally if I was doing black and white I just shoot raw 8 but on these I shoot raw 16 reduce my capture area down to 27 52 by 20 74 just so that I have a little smaller picture a little bit easier to [Music] process that way my output format is a seer file that's a video file you could use avi or seer I've got my exposure set to 15 milliseconds with a gain of 50 and no brightness set I've got the white balance just Auto set on sharp cap then I came up here and to my start capture and I'm capturing a thousand frames and so basically what I've got here right now is 336 of 1000 frames and it will run there for a couple minutes once I collect a thousand frames then we'll come back and I'll show you how I process it all right to stack our image we're going to use a free program called Auto stacker now there are actually several different programs that you can use for this you could use a register and I do use reg stacks sometimes for other lunar imaging but not for stacking I prefer Auto stackert I think most lunar imagers most guys that have done this sort of prefer it so that's the program that we're going to use and all you've got to do is go over and get the file the in my case it's an SAR file drag it over to open alright and by the way I'm going to put the link for Auto stacker so you can download it for free in your computer I'm gonna back off the zoom here just a little bit so you can see it brings up a preview image of our you know one of the one of the frames so if I went through the frames here up here you could go through all the different frames that I've collected of the thousand frames first thing you want to do because we're going to be using a lunar image we're gonna click on surface and then I'm going to click on analyze and this is going to just take a couple of minutes here and run through and it is going to look at the various frames that I've captured and it's going to do analysis as to the quality it's going to try to arrange them in order of best to worst and if there's any really bad frames that will throw them out and it will give me a quick look at my it take a quick look at the stack and we'll give that just a second here now you'll see over here on my quality growth about 50% maybe a little bit more of my data is really above this line that's what I'm looking for in my case well I'm going to stack 50% of my images but before I do that I've got to come over here I'm going to click on 24 and place grid and notice what it'll do it will put all these little red dots these are the marks it's going to use so that it can orient all of my frames together okay once I've done that now with your image if you know you've got a lot more data above that 50% line or you know quality line go ahead and stack more stack as much of a percentage as you can if it's really bad data then just stack a smaller percentage and then I'm going to click on stack and it's going to run through here and this is going to take a couple of moments but when it's done what it's going to do is spit out for me and a file in whatever folder that I had my seer file in it is going to put a new folder that says ASP 50 and that's going to have my stacked image in it this is all 1000 frames that I took all stacked on top of each other and it brings out a lot of the quality with that done it's now time to go over and finish up this process in Photoshop okay I've dragged my image my Auto stackert image over into Photoshop and this is what it looks like and overall this is already for me at least already a pretty clear picture and I'm not gonna do a lot of initial work on it here in Photoshop but let me say this to you if you needed to brighten up the image of course you could come up to image go to adjustments brightness you can adjust the brightness and contrast there to kind of fit your picture I'm not going to do that in this particular image because overall this looks pretty good to me we will do some you know noise reduction and a few things once we're done and you know once we're done with all of our processing but right now I'm gonna leave it just about as it is the first thing I'm going to do because I know that when I start doing my saturation levels I'm going to bring in a lot of noise I'm gonna go immediately up here to filter and I'm going to go to noise reduce noise and then this is my settings here I've got it set up to ten you can adjust this depending on your image preserve details I definitely wanted to preserve as many details as possible reduce color noise sharpen the details just a little bit I'm gonna press okay that's going to clean up some of the noise this is where we add in our color into our picture and it's really snazzy and simple way to do this okay once you come down here and right underneath of under your layers section you'll see this little button alright looks like a half circle yin and yang kind of a thing here click on it go to hue/saturation and what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna pull this bar up until I start seeing see how this is starting to change color just a little bit here and I'm gonna pull this up to say maybe around 40 or 50 you don't want to get too crazy with this then I can go to 50 okay and then I'm gonna I'm gonna close it and what I'm gonna do now is I'm just gonna duplicate that layer alright so come over here and I'm going to duplicate layer and I'm gonna see it brought out a little bit more color and then I'm gonna do that again brought out a little bit more color now what you've got to start watching here is how much can you really bring out of the picture you'll notice there's probably a little bit too much blue we're gonna adjust that in just a moment but you notice we're starting to get a little noise up here so in this particular image it's about as far as I'm gonna be able to push the color on this image some images you can really push I'll show you some examples of that and a couple moments where you get a lot more color on just gonna depend on that particular image that you've done then I'm gonna go ahead and flatten the image now what I want to do is go over to Camera Raw and by the way you might have to do that saturation level several times you can experiment I've went pretty aggressive up to 50 there if you do a little bit less of a you know saturation level move that saturation up then you'll add more and more frames yura i'm sorry layers to this and you could think about that you're just sort of building up like paint just one after the other building up your layers and you'll start to get a little bit of color now on this particular one I'm gonna be pretty pretty subtle so I'm gonna go to Camera Raw and now what I want to do is maybe adjust this just a little bit so I'm gonna maybe come over here and I'm gonna pull a little bit of that blue down temperature down and go over a little bit warm it up just a slight bit and you'll see that starts kind of changing what you're seeing over here okay again if I pull it up the saturation or vibrance levels that will start to kind of darken those areas up a lot and I don't want to do too much of that I'm gonna bring out a little bit more little B haze and a little clarity alright and then I am going to adjust this car I don't like this light blue but I'll show you how to adjust that in just a couple of minutes but basically you can see what I've done here I'm starting to just bring a little bit of this out I could adjust I could bring my lights down a little bit because you do have a lot of light in this in this particular pictures of the moon you bring that down a little bit you can take your shadows and darken those if you wanted to I'm not gonna do that too much in this picture but you might want to and you'll see a little bit of a you know stuff down here starting to pop out make this a little bit bigger so you can see what's happening alright the other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to come over here and I want to sharpen my details just a little bit you don't want to over sharpen lunar images or they start to kind of look sort of fake and sort of weird but I I'd like to borderline that I like I like my image is fairly sharp when I'm doing the moon I pull the detail up here just a little bit you could start seeing that we've got a little bit of color coming down in here I'm gonna pull I'm going to try to get a little color noise out it's noise okay I'm pretty happy with what that's looking like so far you can see it brought out a little bit of the brown but I want to try to cool I want to try to fix up that this this down in here see this this light blue that's kind of showing up honestly I've got this area around here a little bit overexposed and that's a problem with the moon it's all I do that a lot I need to work on getting that I'm gonna try to take a little bit of that light blue out by bringing up the red just a tad now you can see what that starts to do and I'm gonna drop a little bit of this and that brought it out just a little bit better again you can play with these colors as much as you want I'm pretty satisfied with that picture pull it back out here so you can kind of see the whole thing I'm kind of satisfied with that on this particular image and I'm gonna settle for that flatten this and then save it but you could play around and that's how you do a color moon let me show you a few other examples of kellerman or a mineral moons that i've done and give you an idea of what's possible and then you make your image the way you want to make it alright guys I hope that was helpful to you and that you enjoyed the video here's a few other images of mineral moons that I've done in recent months [Music] you [Music] you

Channel: The Digital Astronomer

Views: 4,549

Keywords: Moon, lunar imaging, Sharpcap, AutoStakkert, Mineral Moon

Id: 3vv2xGPpfoA

Length: 13min 14sec (794 seconds)

Published: Mon May 04 2020