The Moon's Southern Highlands    at Third Quarter
								Composite of 8 images taken with a Nikon D50 at prime focus on the Southam Observatory 6" scope, 13 October 2006. The camera was operated by Duncan Munro, its owner. The original 1600x2400 RAW image depicted the complete third-quarter Moon. Frames were cropped to 700x600 before processing. The best 8 of more than 30 RAW frames were selected and stacked with IRIS software using the anti-seeing function. Only the green image plane was retained. The image here was sharpened with Photoshop's unsharp tool and resampled 50%. Tycho is the most prominent feature in the upper-left portion of the frame. Clavius is the large crater below Tycho with smaller craters both inside and around its lip. The Moon's south pole is at bottom. This is by no means the best one can do. The "seeing" wasn't very good that night. Yet a great deal of detail was captured. Features as small as a couple kilometres are visible in the original frames. What the image gained most from the stacking was noise reduction, allowing me to apply more sharpening. Left at full-disk size, the raw frames would not stack well because the "seeing" varies so much across each frame.
								Here I have captured the elusive "Werner X" at the sunrise terminator. You can see it for a few hours while the very low Sun is illuminating peaks in the mountainous "lurrain" between Werner, Blanchinus and Regiomontanus. The terminator runs left to right along the bottom. North is to the left. The large old crater at centre is Playfair G. Above and to the right of the "X" is Werner. The image is about 320 km wide. An old Fuji digital camera was mounted to the Observatory's 20-inch Cassegrain telescope using the camera clamp described elsewhere on my site. Eyepiece: Tele Vue 40-mm Erfle (200 power). Time: 10:26 PM PDT March 25, 2007 (0526 UT March 26). Exposure: 1/72 sec at ISO400. Best of 16 images.
			The image was originally made in the camera's native 1280x960 JPG format. The colour planes were resized and nudged with Photoshop to bring them into better registration. The image was then cropped, resampled by 50%, and unsharp masked. Craters as small as 2 km are visible. Although accurate and meticulous, Rukl's excellent Atlas of the Moon doesn't show the "X". Turn to map 55 and look around Werner H northwest of Werner.