Lunar Images

With Christmas so near, I haven't been doing much imaging. It's also been quite cloudy and rainy. Georgia , ot at least Atlanta, is on track for 2018 to be the 5^th wettest year “on record.. Getting images of the moon is actually a fairly quick thing to do.

November 16th image. Ignore "Ken's Canyon".

The first image is around the north end of the moon. The identification was put there for someone else, but it works well here. This image was taken the night of November 16^th.

December 17th image.

This is a mosaic of 7 images taken the night of December 17^th. As you can see, the terminator is in nearly the same place on the moon (as one would expect). The mosaic just allows you to see along the entire terminator, which is usually the most interesting area of the moon. This image is also interesting to me because I was able to show on the November image that the mount was tracking too fast. For the December image, I slowed the mount down 1% and got much better tracking. Unfortunately, the unsteady air more than made up for the previous poor tracking.

Since it is so close to Christmas, I want to wish any readers of this blog a very Merry Christmas.

Revisit of NGC253 Plus A Comet Plus Stars

Below is the same data for NGC253 as the previous post, but I have changes the processing. I think the colors are rendered better. At any rate, I like this one better, even if it was a little harder to do.

NGC253 Reprocessed.I like this one better.

Comet 46P is in the night sky now, and may become a naked eye comet before Christmas. Below is an image taken the night of November 28, 2018. You can see that it looks different than the nearby stars. However, it doesn't seem to have the tail most comets will have. Maybe I should say the prominent tail most comets have. It appears to have a very very faint tail going from upper left (ie, right at the comet) to lower right. I really have to squint to see it.

Comet 46P. Comet is "fuzzy star" in center of picture.

PROCESSING FUN

Below, an image of NGC613, a galaxy in the constellation of the Sculptor.

NGC613

It's an interesting looking galaxy in it's own right. However, when I process to bring out the very faint details, instead of the 2 prominent spiral arms, 3 more faint ones can be seen. I think that's pretty cool.

NGC613 cropped and brightened a LOT.

Finally, we have 2 images of NGC288, which is a globular cluster, also in Sculptor. For the 1^st image, the one below, I combined all 10 second exposures (ie, 25 lum at 10 secs, 11 red at 10 secs, 11green at 10 secs, and 11 blue at 10 secs).

NGC288 10 sec exposures.

Compare that one to the one below. The difference between the 2 is that the RGB channels of the one below are each 1 minute exposures (ie, lum the same, but red is 5 exposure at 1 min, green is 5 exposures at 1 min, and blue is 5 exposures at 1 min.). Obviously, more stars can be seen in the 1 minute exposure image (even though the lum channel is exactly the same), but the colors of the stars has shifted decidedly to the red. I wonder why that is.

NGC288 1 min is RGB(5), still 10 sec in Lum(25).