LightningPaul

The Moon, a picture taken while making a walk with the kids. I was in Poland where you mostly have a very clear sky. In Belgium you have mostly too much light pollution and raising hot air bubbles. The latter makes the view more shaking.


TECH-INFO: it would have been ideal to use a tripod so I could have a low ISO. Nevertheless the kids didn't want to wait, I had no tripod with me but still this moon was looking so beautiful. Luckily my lens has VR stabilization, so 1/125 worked fine.

During post-processing I had to use a few tricks to get this result. First, in DxO for RAW conversion I made the contrast higher and have chosen the white balance sun (instead of shade). The latter makes sure I get an equal amount of data from the red, green and blue channels (if you choose for instance shade for white balance then you mostly use the red channel, so discarding most of the other sensor info). The result was an image with high contrast, ugly blue bright sky and lost of noise but that was easily resolved with Noise Ninja (only applied on the sky, not the moon). To enhance the details of the Moon I used twice the High Pass filter (once with 5 pixel radius and once with 10) and blended in soft light mode. Again here I used a mask, not to boost any noise in the sky. Finally I made the bright blue sky darker with the B/W tool (only the sky, not the moon). Finally some vignetting is added. Also the image is heavily cropped (to 1 megapixel) because the Moon is much smaller in an image when using a 200mm lens.

The Moon looks very detailed but be aware that some of the details might be enhanced noise. Another way to get very detailed images of the Moon is to use a stronger lenses, for instance a telescope, using a web cam (1 megapixels is enough) and film the Moon. In other words, you get 30 images a second. Some of the images will be blurry because of raising hot air bubbles. The other ones are bundled together and analyzed together using wavelet algorithms. This results into very sharp and detailed images of the Moon, even when using a web cam. This a method I heard in the Astrolab IRIS in Ieper, Belgium. They have big telescopes, like you see on this image. I'm not sure but I think they used this one for making Moon images too.