From: Alan Friedman <alan@greatarrow.com>

Date: November 3, 2009 10:49:50 AM MST

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Re: First light Scorpion and the Full Moon

The setting that controls contrast is <gamma>. 

Gain for monochrome cameras is set under <brightness>. 

I would suggest leaving the gamma setting neutral (1.00) when imaging the moon. There is a tremendous range of tonality on the lunar surface - you want to record as much as possible. It is always possible to increase contrast later if needed.

Brightness is a more complicated trade-off. Stacking will subdue the noisy residue from high gain and allow faster captures which will help tame the atmospheric turbulence, but then...

Best is to experiment and experiment and then experiment some more.

Alan

On Nov 3, 2009, at 12:14 PM, Howard wrote:

I did set the gain higher as it gave me more contrast. The movies look better than the monitor: lots of little cells about a hundred pixels across slowly breathing. Breathe in, breathe out.

--- In Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com, Alan Friedman <alan@...> wrote:
>
> Great to see all these Scorpion stings!
>
> Howard - You've done a nice job keep some bright tonality in
> Aristarchus. Overall, the image seems noisy to me considering a stack
> of 900 frames. I would think a lunar capture at this focal ratio
> should be possible with low gain and would expect the individual
> frames to have very low noise prior to stacking.
>