12 Day Old Moon

Feb 25, 2002 06:19-07:33 UTC - This image is a painful example of why doing a project like this requires an equatorial mount. Currently, my LX-90 only mounts in Altitude-Azimuth mode. In Alt-Az mode, the image in the scope slowly rotates over time making it very tough to snap a series of shots, get total coverage, and stitch them together. This shot was the harder than previous shots because I took it when the moon was at it's highest point, which is also where the image rotates the fastest in the scope. Chalking this up to a learning experience, I won't be taking any more shots until I acquire an equatorial wedge for my scope.

The image was created by stitching together 35 images using Paintshop Pro 7.02. Each image was created by capturing AVIs with a modified old Connectix Color QuickCam and using Vega. The AVIs were then processed using AstroStack. Each image was stacked from 40 frames from each AVI. The telescope used was a Meade LX-90 (8" SCT, f/10).

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