Thursday, September 18, 2008

An Insane Full Moon Photo


Bart Declercq in Haaltert, Belgium made this 23,000,000-pixel image of the 99.74% full moon with equipment similar to mine.

He writes:
Took a while to process, at 43 separate 1000 frame AVI's, up to 35 alignment points per AVI and 128 best images per point.

Taken with Celestron C9.25 in prime focus (F/10 = 2350mm) with DMK31 camera and infrared filter.

The original image is 4820x4820 pixels and 3.9 megabytes in size (the original 16-bits TIFF is 50 megabytes) and can be accessed here.

Next goal, on a high mid-winter full moon, is to do this at F/16, which should result in about a 64 million pixel image, and will require well over a hundred AVIs.

At the theoretical limit of my scope, it should be possible to go up to F/24, which will result in a roughly 200 million pixel image, but which would require more than 200 AVI's - the biggest problem with that would be that there's not enough time in one night to shoot such an image with the DMK31...

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Has anyone considered taking pictures of the moon every 5 minits for the full month and theb processing the terminator for details and keeping only the area with the most details. This would be a project that would require at least 10-15 telescopes to get the required photos. also I suspect that they would have to be on same latatude withen 10 degrees. thouhh combined north and southern hemisphere photos might be am interesting photo.