Above: Nice view of the whole visible Disk (in color)
Strangely, many astronomers have a negative attitude towards the moon. Moonlight impairs the view of the faint galaxies and nebula they want to view. I share that to some extent, but definitely enjoy lunar viewing from time to time. I was in a "moon mood" this night (Saturday, June 7th, 2003)... One of the astronomy magazines noted that on this day the moon was half-lit, and that it was a good time to view a number of Lunar Features. Moon age: 7 days 19 hours. Rupes Recta (the Straight Wall) is barely visible in the middle.
Vallis Alpes: "One of the best known lunar valleys, about 180 km long... A narrow sinuous rille... runs along the middle of the valley... (visible) just before first and last quarter." (Rukl p.199) Mirror image.
Lots of fancy Photoshopping on this one... Used Grain Surgery plug-in to remove grain (noise) in red and blue channels, mixed the RGB colors into grayscale, and then tried a new unsharp mask technique (500%, .4 radius, 5 threshold).
Above: Some nice detail... For you imaging folks, I took this on the digital camera in color. Then I altered the image to use only the green channel (of the RGB) and changed it to black and white.Moon age: 7 days 19 hours. Rupes Recta (the Straight Wall) is barely visible in the middle. Rupes Recta (the Straight Wall) is barely visible in the middle.
Features labeled on right.
Above: Still more nice detail, at full pixel resolution of the camera, using a custom mix of the RGB channels.. This is a crop from the previous pic, but from a blend of the two channels showing the most detail. Usually I resize moon pictures, which helps reduce noise and increase sharpness. If you look carefully you can see the noise around the bright highlights in the craters. This is barely visible on my monitor (1280x1024 pixels), but will be easily visible on displays set to lower resolutions.
Photos by Dick Locke
Olympus C-4040 digital camera
Tak FS-102, Losmandy GM-11 mount
Processed in Photoshop
Copyright © 1998-2005, Dick Locke. All Rights Reserved.
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