Full Moon 8-19-24

In August, we had a “blue supermoon” which is technically unique but in practice no different than any other full moon. In any case, it was a good opportunity to take pictures of the moon. I have taken moon photos to varying degrees of success many times over the years, but this is my best one to date thanks to better equipment and image stacking. I was happy to see a lot of great surface details. Subtle mineral colors are visible. These colors are detected by the camera sensor but are not usually apparent to the human eye. There are some very highly-saturated pictures of the moon online that show extremely prominant mineral colors - I went for more realistic levels here.

Technical details:

• Lens: SkyWatcher 120
• Camera: Nikon D3200
• Mount: SkyAdventurer 2i
• Optics: Celestron 2x Barlow Lens
• Exposure: 234x1/500s at ISO200
• Pre-processing: PIPP
• Stacking: AutoStakkert 3
• Post-processing: RegiStax 6, PhotoScape X, Lightroom

Notes for improvement:

• Chromatic aberration was a big problem due to my optics. I was mostly able to remove this in processing but the result was imperfect.
• I sometimes revisit this image and experiment with adjustments to colors, brightness, and contrast. I have yet to come up with a better final version, but that could change in the future. If so, I will update the image.