Photographing the Moon – 8 December 2016

I was preparing to photograph the Moon again. Another Supermoon was  occurring later this month. I was after some better images, but using the same equipment – a hand held camera and telephoto lens. This time I wanted to take a series of photos and then stack them using software to produce a higher quality composite image. I hadn’t done this before, so watched a video on Youtube that demonstrated the technique with the Moon and gave links to the software (a program called Registax).

Well, a few days before the Supermoon, I took 15 or so pictures of the Moon and tried out the software. The video warned that it may crash a few times during use (it did), but I persevered, re-cropped my original images and tried again and it worked quite well. Here is a final image –

And here is one of the set of images that I included in the stack – 

At this small size the difference is not that apparent. But the stacked images does seem to have a lot more detail. Here are the same pictures, but with a tighter crop –

Stacked Image

Single Image

As for the Supermoon – during the period of full moon it was continually overcast.

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