After 10 p.m. CEST, there was a brief phase of decreasing cloud cover in Recklinghausen and the moon, which was more than 30° high, came out. However, it remained behind a thick soup of high fog and haze, which had darkened it noticeably and colored it reddish. This was immediately visible in the histogram in FireCapture because the green channel was weaker(!) than the red channel and I had to work with an exposure time of 23 ms at 8 % gain. Clouds that were still moving through made careful exposure settings impossible and the imperfect alignment of the moon was also due to the short time window. In addition, the Apo had not yet cooled down properly, so focusing was also difficult. With the naked eye, the mare could only be seen vaguely and very blurred.
I edited the sum stack from Autostakkert!4 in the RAW developer ART and tried to remove some of the haze with the Haze-Removal-Tool. I'm still struggling with the white balance. Is there a formation on the moon, as close to the eastern edge as possible, that is ideally gray so that it could be used as a “gray map”? Or does anyone have any other tips on how to solve the problem? In my opinion, moon images in color are definitely a gain in aesthetics and information, especially if you pull the saturation up a good bit, as happened here.
What can you see?
Crater Proclus on the western edge of Mare Crisium immediately stands out due to its high albedo. The same goes for the region between the craters Snellius and Furnerius, which has a bluish-white glow and should therefore be relatively young.
Crater Posidonius looks very unusual at this position of the sun: The crater rim is a continuous dark ring while the crater interior is significantly brighter than the surrounding area - kind of eerie.
Due to the current libration, you can see Mare Marginis to the east of Mare Crisium and Mare Smythii to the south. At 1 o'clock you can see the Mare Humboldtianum on the northern edge and on the southern edge, at about 5 o'clock, the northern foothills of the Mare Australe with the crater Lyot. The libration alone made it worthwhile to quickly put the equipment on the loggia, in my opinion.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
Hardware: TS-Optics Photoline 80 mm f/6 FPL53 Triplet-Apo · ToupTek G3M178C
Software:
FireCapture ·
AutoStakkert!4 ·
ART#
moon #
astronomy
