Feb 2 2007 - Geologic Colors of the moon

Well here is my latest experimentations with astrophotography. You may wonder what is the point of having such an unatural colorful moon? Well apart from looking kina cool, the colors actualy show the differences in the soil and rock chemical compositions of the moon. this technique has been used before to determine the chemical makeup of the moon as well to determine the ages of the different areas of the moon. each color signifies a different type of rock or soil. Although it does look pretty, my shots can't compare to some other peoples shots who have used this technique BUT i am happy with my first try at this. A great example of this was done by the Galileo spacecraft when it took a mosaic of the moon and put it into false color showing the wide variaty of rock compositions. The moon to the naked eye may appear grey but in reality there is very subtle differences in the colors and thus this is why we can get the false colors. The colors are naturaly there, we just need to increase the saturation of each color so that it appears multi colored. All these images have been taken with my 5" MCT and canon G3 digital camera. They are all stack ranging from 6 images all the way up to 80 images! Also I have stacked these in photoshop instead of astrostack and I am liking the results. Please Click to Enlarge!

Enjoy :-)

Single image showing natural color of the moon

A 32 image stack showing the natural colors of the moon

Another natural color moon photo. 16 stacked images

January 31 2007 - Sun Spots

The following are pictures of the sun taken with my old Canon G3 digital camera and my 5" MCT and 40mm plossal EP. The wide angle (entire solar disk) is taken at 0 zoom, the middle one is taken at 4X zoom and the third is taken with the 40mm plossal and a 2X barlow lens at 4X zoom. The fourth picture is just a comparison of what processing can do! Please click on photos to see larger version.