How to shoot the mineral moon

[Music] do [Music] so [Music] everyone how's it going so it's uh it's christmas day right now and i just got the telescope set up because i'm planning to take some moon pictures tonight so i figured i'd make a little youtube video show you guys how i shoot mineral moon images and um also maybe do a little bit of a camera experiment with uh using the planetary camera and my deep sky camera so i have a um 183 mm but i also have a qhy 600 i want to try using for moon images so yeah it's going to be a little photographic adventure tonight nothing serious just some moon shots and yeah hopefully you get something cool alrighty so i'm all set up now ready to get on imaging but you can see the moon right now it's still pretty low and it's still a little blue out so i'm gonna wait for dark um and i'm actually going to wait until probably closer to midnight or one since uh the moon is going to be closer to zenith and when the moon is highest you look through the louisiana the least air and you get the best picture that way so that's we're going to be waiting for um but before that i wanted to talk a little bit about mineral moon images so the main principle behind getting an image of the mineral moon is you need to stack if you don't stack and it'll be very hard to get the colors by stacking you increase the signal-to-noise ratio of the image and you're able to actually saturate the image further and all saturation is is stretching the color channels harder and harder so you need lots of data to be able to stretch them well and to be able to see any colors to begin with so what we're going to be doing is we're going to be shooting video frames with the mm i'm probably going to be doing around 2000 frames per channel and stacking 35 to 50 of the frames and that way we'll build up a large amount of data and we'll be able to get a clean signal to saturate a ton to bring out the actual colors if you're going to do this with a dslr though you could do similar and stack multiple images instead of recording video frames so you can shoot mineral moon images with pretty much any camera you just need to be able to stack and i'm going to handle the stacking with auto stacker it's pretty much the best stacking program out there these days for planetary or lunar work and solar work so we're going to be using that to bring out the colors in the pictures and also some of the details as well so yeah that is the gist of it [Music] as you can see i got my telescope set up and it is very much pointed at the moon and now is the time to start actually capturing frames so i'm just gonna i don't know how much of this i'm gonna show but basically as you can tell in my field of view it's really small so i can't actually fit everything in and i'm going to have to do a mosaic which actually presents a lot of problems later on in editing very annoying problems when i'm choosing my exposure for the moon there's some things to keep in mind you just got to be careful that you don't clip certain parts on the moon because there are a couple craters that are really really really bright and it simplifies things to just keep one exposure time throughout all data sets so it's just helpful to make sure that you're not clipping everything or anything at all and every filter first so stuff like this over here that clips really easily so i'm just going to pick an exposure check red green and blue make sure i'm not clipping anything i'm very slightly clipping it looks like so i'm what i'm going to do is drop my gain now i can be sure i'm not clipping anywhere now all we have to do is go through and start capturing our panorama frames [Music] alrighty so it's the next day running the zw0183 mm that camera shoots a lot of data very fast and my ssd for some reason wasn't up to handling it so i ended up deleting all the data i shot with that and i threw on the qhy 600 instead this is more of a deep sky camera though but since it has a full frame sensor i'm able to fit the full moon and i can just shoot it in one go so this will be a lot like shooting it with a dslr basically and it should have about the same amount of detail since they both use 2.4 micron pixels so i won't have any resolution loss i'll just have less data to work with so what i ended up doing is i shot 30 frames per rgb channel and i'm going to be stacking each of those and then color combining them and editing an image from that let's get to editing alrighty guys so we're back at the computer now and it's time to start editing the data that we got uh due to a comedy of errors i could not get the qhy 600 data to color balance properly so what i have instead is a set of dslr images taken from the next night full frame still and this will be a bit more useful for those trying to follow along or produce a similar image because most of you are likely to have dslrs anyways the first thing you're going to want to do is take these raw files and convert them into tiffs there's a million ways to do that you could use pipp you could use adobe photoshop camera raw you could use pixinsight pick your poison for converting these into a format that auto stacker can recognize so what i'm going to do now is pull up auto stacker we're going to open up all of our image files and you need to switch this from all supported video to image files because it won't be able to see them otherwise we'll just grab our images open them up and then we can start to stack the data so there's the moon um this is a surface and not a planet so we're going to stabilize this by the surface not by the center of gravity so these settings are all fine as they are here and what we're going to start with is analyzing the data so this is going to stabilize the frames align them and it will analyze all the frames for the quality so when we go to stack we can decide how much we want to reject and how much we want to keep in the stack for detail i'm going to keep a majority of these since seeing was pretty good it's high up and i'm more concerned with getting signal to build color than i am how sharp the mountains are so what we're going to do now is place an align point grid and this will just act as alignment references for stacking the frames and i'm also going to drizzle this image because uh i use dslr and the pixels are 5.4 microns so i'm a bit uh curious about getting more resolution so what this does is it increases the resolution of your image using the drizzle integration algorithm it works pretty well so we'll give that a go and then we'll just stack our image all right so stacking has finished up and as you can see the resulting image looks pretty nice it's very clean it's got some good details in it and the next thing we're going to need to do is actually balance the color channels properly so that we can you know see the minerals and that kind of thing i'm going to be doing this in pixin sites there is a worse way to do it in photoshop but i'm going to show you this pics inside method so the first thing i'm going to do is split the rgb channels like so and then we're going to come up here to the linear fit process and we're going to use this to color balance the images so i'm going to use green as the reference since it has the most signal and then we're just going to linear fit all of our images directly to the green all right now that those have been linear fitted we're going to go in here to channel combination and i'm just going to grab all of our images that we've just linear fitted and i'm going to apply global to merge them now this is a color balanced image and i can get rid of these other images do not need them and now we can check our saturation to see if the minerals are brought out properly and those are the colors that you exactly want to see you want to see the blue and the orange balance nicely like that there is a bit of color noise we'll deal with that later on but that is how you get these nice mineral colors in your images so i'm going to start going through and uh editing the details in the image i'm going to time lapse pretty much through the editing you can do whatever you want you know whatever curves i'm going to use deconvolution wavelets some curves then i'll be doing some color noise reduction stuff later on but yeah that's how you get the colors in your moon pictures so yeah i hope you enjoy this next little spit up part of me editing [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Bray Falls

Views: 4,193

Keywords: Astrophotography, Moon, Space, Mineral moon, C9.25 edge hd, Paramount myt, Planetary, Telescope, Astronomy

Id: rWYZIYWsNxs

Length: 12min 3sec (723 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 28 2020