Dabbling In Moon Imaging

The first-quarter moon is good to look at in the telescope, since the craters are well-highlighted, and I am more wont to be skygazing in the evening than in the wee hours of the morning (which is when you see the third quarter moon). Tonight I thought I’d try my luck at imaging the moon through my 7” reflector using our digicam. The results are at left. I’m interested in an astrophotography technique called image stacking, where you take a large number of frames of a single object, align these, and average them to try to sharpen the image. This was my first try at this technique, using the movie clip feature of the digicam to get my stack of images, and then specialized software (Keith’s Image Stacker is the one I tried out) to help align the frames. I don’t think this first attempt improved things much, but there’s a lot yet to learn here.