I've been taking images now for about 4 years with my telescope. I've been using the same camera, a Canon 60D the entire time. I've taken plenty of images of the moon, but not like this one. All this time I have been framing up the moon and firing away about 40 RAW 18MP images. Stacking them manually in Photoshop and then sharpening. I usually end up with an image that looks good at around 2-3MP. Any larger than that and it's just not sharp because of atmospheric conditions. The image is also only sharp in the middle of the moon. As you move towards the side you loose focus due to my telescopes curved mirror.
Things changed last week. I finally bough BackYardEOS, a program that controls Canon cameras through your laptop. One of the features it has is it can turn your Canon camera into a pretty darn good planetary imaging camera. It does this by recording a video from your sensor. But not the entire sensor. just the center most part, around 1024x680 pixels. And it can do this at a frame rate around 30fps and will save all of that data as an uncompressed AVI file (Registax compatible). This will give you a great "zoomed in" video of whatever object you aim your scope at. Because I am capturing light that is traveling through MILES of atmosphere, it is subject to a lot of random movement. The atmosphere is moving, different temperatures at different layers, and also has mixed amounts of moisture. All of this adds up to making your image blurry. Taking videos is the only way around this. Because you are capturing 30 fps you are bound to capture images when the atmosphere stood still for just a 1/100th of a second. I chose to take 1,200 frames per video, that way I would increase my likelihood of getting good images with minimal blurring. I decided to test this out on the Moon this Monday night and I was shocked at the results.
My settings were as follows;
Tv: 125/thAv: f/10 which is 1500mm for my 6in Cassegrain ScopeISO: 40025fps1200 frames captured per video.
Just one video was not going to cover the entire moon because it was cropped in so much. So I had to record 15 separate videos. Using the telescopes hand controller I would center on the cameras sensor, the area to image. Then wait while BackYardEOS would capture 1200 uncompressed images and save it as an AVI file. Then using the hand controller again, I would re-aim the scope at the next area to image. It ended up taking me 15 videos working my way around the moon to capture the 1/2 moon.... and each video was 2.3 GB in files size. (Uncompressed video makes large files) So I ended up capturing 35 GB of uncompressed AVI files! All for one final image. Crazy... I know!
I packed up and went inside. All of the videos opened in Registax and processed very smoothly. I had Registax pick the best (most sharp = least atmospheric blurring) 150 frames from each of the 15 videos for stacking. (Stacking refers to combining/averaging pixel values together to increase signal and reduce random sensor noise.) Once I had all 15 videos finished I was left with 15 - true 16bit uncompressed tiff files with extremely low noise. I opened up Photoshop, went to File/Automate/Photomerge and chose the 15 images. Photoshop took about 2 minutes to organized and stitched together all 15 frames into one master image of the entire Moon. I then just had to do a smart sharpen and this is what I was left with! (Smart sharpen is used to further reduce any atmospheric blurring.)
Advanced note: Because all 15 images were taken from the very center of my telescope (remember the videos are cropped from the center of my sensor) they are all the same focus and sharpness from the best part of my telescope mirror. This technique kind of turns a cassegrain scope into a nice Flat Field Astrograph. Notice how sharpness is maintained all the way to the edge of the moon. This also increases resolution. This image is 9.4MP and still sharp!