Older, but no wiser
Andy Borrows' musings on life and all its confusion, contradictions, richness and opportunities
Thursday, July 14, 2005
Lunacy
A maximum zoom of 140mm (35mm equivalent) is hardly up to the task of lunar photography. But there are ways and means...
This first image is 220 x 220 pixels cropped straight out of the original shot:
The trouble is, at this magnification, much of the detail is smaller than a pixel and gets lost. But suppose you could take a dozen or more images and somehow average them - surely there would be more total information captured, if only it could be summed into a single picture? It turns out that's exactly what software designed to pull detail out of astronomical images does.
Like this:
Just a first attempt, built from 16 individual shots (a nice binary number for a computer to work with); I need to play and find out what all the tweaks do. Obviously it can't work miracles, but there's no doubt that it gives a very worthwhile improvement.
And to put it into context, here's the complete original frame:
Freeware courtesy of Registax
This first image is 220 x 220 pixels cropped straight out of the original shot:
The trouble is, at this magnification, much of the detail is smaller than a pixel and gets lost. But suppose you could take a dozen or more images and somehow average them - surely there would be more total information captured, if only it could be summed into a single picture? It turns out that's exactly what software designed to pull detail out of astronomical images does. Like this:
Just a first attempt, built from 16 individual shots (a nice binary number for a computer to work with); I need to play and find out what all the tweaks do. Obviously it can't work miracles, but there's no doubt that it gives a very worthwhile improvement.
And to put it into context, here's the complete original frame:
Freeware courtesy of Registax
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