I took this image of the 9-day old waxing gibbous Moon on Sunday night, 3rd May 2009.

The image has been colour-enhanced to emphasise the composition differences of geological formations. From APOD:

..blue hues reveal titanium rich areas while orange and purple colors show regions relatively poor in titanium and iron.

The Colour Saturated Moon. Click the image to see the large size.

Continue reading to find out how I captured and processed this image.

This image was captured using my Canon 20D, attached to a Williams Optics 0.8x focal reducer/field flattener, pointing through my ED80. This gave a focal length of 480mm at f/6 focal ratio.

I used a wireless remote and the burst mode of the 20D to snap 21 images at 1/100s, ISO100.

All 21 images were converted from RAW to TIFF, then stacked in Registax with very very light wavelet processing. In Photoshop, I created a luminance layer and sharpened it using “Smart Sharpen”, and enhanced the colours in a colour layer by using several iterations of saturation boost with the Hue/Saturation tool. Finally a slight guassian blur on the colour layer, and an overall gamma adjustment to increase the contrast.

The image is cropped significantly due to the relatively short focal length. The Moon only took up a small portion in the middle of the frame. The full-size version (click the image to download the full-size version) is a 1:1 pixel crop.

I don’t usually take Moon images with this equipment, but I’m really pleased with how it turned out and it’s inspired me to do it again – maybe at full moon. Next time i’ll remove the focal reducer from the imaging train to increase the focal length and capture a bit more detail.

Thanks for looking.

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