sharper moon pics

[nytecam]

I know the forum likes moon pics and I took this one last night with the moon low in the south where it takes on a yellowish tone due to its low altitude.

I held my old Fuji digicam to the telescope eyepiece and snapped away. The scope has a simple 2-element f/5 achromat lens [costing just a few £ - a fraction of the cost of fully corrected camera lenses of similar focal length costing £100s - £1000s] but my simple scope does show colour fringing called chromatic aberration.

This can be largely eliminated with post channel splitting of the RGB images that make-up the full colour image via software like PaintShopPro as shown below. The telescope, corrected for visual use, is sharpest in green light [third from left] and this image comes out best with a little sharpening eg better than the red, blue and even the full colour image. Note how soft the blue image is to the right and this is the cause of most blurring in the colour picture. Fortunately the moon is monochrome so showing it in B&W looses little. Hope it's of interest

[Bruce Williams]

Interesting post nytecam and your example images illustrate your point really well - thank you.

I took some pics of the moon last night and have been trying various ways of pulling out more detail. I would NEVER have thought of channel splitting so your post is extremely timely offering an approach that I will definitely explore.

Bruce