Bartosz Wojczynski: Gibbous Moon Poster

Gibbous Moon by Bartosz Wojczynski

When viewed with the naked eye, the moon appears to be a colorless object. It turns out, however, that with the use of specialized photographic techniques, we are able to “extract” a lot of color details from the surface of our satellite.

The picture was taken with a 2.4 meter focal length telescope. The image was recorded with a dedicated monochrome camera for astrophotography equipped with red and blue filters.

By increasing the differences between the color channels of the image many times over, we get an image that clearly shows very subtle differences in the color of the Moon’s surface. Orange areas show more iron oxides, while blue areas show titanium oxides.

Photo details

• Date & time: 2015 August 6th; 03:03 ~ 03:30 CEST
• Location: Piekary Śląskie, Poland
• Optics: Celestron C9.25
• Camera: ZWO ASI174MM
• Filters
  • ZWO R
  • ZWO B
• Mount: Sky-Watcher HEQ5
• Tripod: Sky-Watcher 2" steel tripod
• Composition: 8 pane mosaic
• Exposure
  • 2000 frames per filter & pane, 20% stacked
  • R filter: 33 ms per frame at gain 40
  • B filter: 46 ms per frame at gain 48
  • 2350 mm, f/10
• Processing
  • AutoStakkert 3: align, stack
  • Astra Image 5: Lucy-Richardson deconvolution
  • Adobe Photoshop CC: combine channels, compose mosaic (Photomerge), ACR filter

About the author

Bartosz Wojczynski: Astronomy lover with over ten years of experience in the field of astrophotography. Winner of many prestigious awards, incl. Astrobin Image of the Day and NASA APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day). Organizer of astrophotographic expeditions to the darkest places on our planet. Bartosz appreciates versatility and diversity – his photographic output includes both deep sky photos, extreme close-ups of the moon, and astroscapes that show the beauty of outer space in a wide field. On a daily basis he works as a specialist in image processing and 3D graphics.