Last weekend on the 24th, when we briefly had a bit of snow, it actually cleared up in the evening and this lovely slice of moon came out for a moment – long enough for me to take a series of exposures for some stacking work, resulting in an at least halfway clear photo.

I completely forgot to post the Moon from Saturday evening – we had a break in the lousy weather late at night and I was able to snap some photos for another round of stacking. About 20 images as usual, this time with less processing save for some wavelet sharpening via Registax.

And here’s todays full Moon – it’s so bright that it’s actually not so easy to photograph if you don’t have any filters! Stacked from about 20 images and enhanced a little bit (okay, a lot).

Here’s a slightly different attempt, I gave the Moon a little more punch and contrast to make the “seas” more prominent and to get more craters to show up. Stacked from about 20 images, the source images look much too flat for my taste! Full Moon on Sunday, hope the weather plays along.

And here’s the “real” first Moon from 2015, taken about 16:30 this afternoon just in time before it got a bit too hazy to take clear photos. Happy New Astronomy Year 2015 :-).

And the first Moon of 2015, taken at about 2am when the Moon was just on the other side of the house… it was worth staying up to start the new year with astrophotography :-). And the “real” first Moon of 2015 from just a moment ago is coming up soon, too – still needs to be processed, though!

The last Moon of 2014, taken at about 17:15. We had some incredibly clear skies later yesterday on New Year’s Eve and even managed to have a good look at Jupiter through the telescope!

This could possibly be my last moon photo of the year, depending on how the weather plays along tomorrow… but given that it wasn’t completely dark yet, this is a surprisingly good try. Stacked from 20 images with RegiStax as usual, with a little bit of wavelet sharpening and a high-pass filter applied, although this time, I left the brightness and contrast like they came out of the camera.

Yesterday’s half moon – I went back to the old method of using the normal resolution because an attempt with the digital zoom was just too blurry. But I upped the number of stacked images to 20 and that seems to have decreased the noise dramatically although I used a lot of wavelet sharpening on this.

An experiment for the 50th stacked Moon from yesterday: I used the digital zoom of the camera for this to get a larger image which sacrificed detail, but it also allowed to get rid of a lot of artifacts in the stacked image, which I resized from 1200×1200 to 800×800 – I’m not quite convinced if this is really more detailed that a straight 600×600 crop, but it was worth a try. I’m not sure if I’m going to use this method again, though.