Astrophotography has been an enjoyable hobby that provides lots of learning experiences. This past week I worked on imaging the last quarter Moon during the morning hours from 9AM-11AM. Why during the day? Parents of small children know that getting a good night's rest can be quite the challenging at times. As a result, I have very few pictures of the Moon after the full Moon. This is because..
- The Last quarter Moon rises after midnight and sets at Noon
- The Waning crescent Moon rises at 3AM and sets at 3PM.
So what are the challenges to daytime astrophotography?
TELESCOPE ALIGNMENT
During the evening hours, I always to a polar alignment on my telescope so the telescope software has the ability to find any stellar object in the sky. During the day, this is not possible. I do my best to align my telescope with true north and let the software slew my telescope to where it thinks the Moon is located. Then I have to eyeball it by finding the Moon in the sky visually.
The primary challenge of daytime astrophotography is the brightness of the sky, making it difficult to get enough contrast in your images of the Moon. Second, it is really hard to get a sharp focus on the Moon because of the daytime brightness and various atmospheric conditions. Poor atmospheric conditions blur your image and creates distortions in your images. Finally, weather conditions can always mess up an imaging session. Depending on your season and location, clouds can ruin an imaging session.
Once I have found the Moon visually, I use the lowest magnification eyepiece with my telescope to help me located the Moon in the sky. Once located, I center up the Moon in the eyepiece and use the tracking feature of the telescope. For these images, I used my ZWO ASIAIR Mini Wi-Fi Camera Controller to track the Moon.
LUCKY IMAGING
For this project, I mainly used the lucky imaging technique. Lucky Imaging is where you take hundreds or thousands of images over a short timespan with short exposures to minimize poor seeing conditions in the atmosphere. In short, I took videos of the Moon. I took two minutes videos that created around 1000 images (the camera took around 8.5 high-resolution frames per second).
Using AutoStakkert! software on my computer, I am able to take best images from those video files to produce a high-resolution image. By combining multiple images and making some modification in the contrast, sharpness, orientation, and color through Adobe Photoshop, I am able to get some descent daytime images of our Moon in its last Quarter.
Visit my YouTube channel for more astrophotography
https://www.astrobortle.com/
Check out my Astro-photos images on AstroBin!
https://www.astrobin.com/users/erikgigem/
High Point Scientific
https://www.highpointscientific.com/?rfsn=7755489.66ed8e
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