Sunday, May 20, 2007

My first lunar mosaic with the DMK

Last night I took about 22 AVI files of the moon, which was only 3.6 days old at the time and a very pretty crescent sitting right next to Venus. Each AVI was separately processed in Registax and saved as a TIFF file. Then the files were opened in Photoshop and manually pasted into a large new image. Registax will usually leave a little border on the image or you will be able to see the overlapping edges of many individual frames. What seemed to work best for me was the following:


1. In Photoshop, click Select > All, or CTRL+A
2. Click Select > Modify > Border, and specify a border of about 10 pixels
3. Click Select > Inverse to select everything inside the border.
4. It also helps to specify a feathered border of about 5 pixels. Click Select > Feather and enter the pixel value.


Do the above for every image that makes up the mosaic. Photoshop will try to fit them together as you move each image with the mouse. Usually it gets it right every time. I only had one image out of 22 that required me to manually adjust the image to get it to line up properly.
It's a good thing I was doing this with a young Moon. I couldn't imaging having to do this with a larger area. Just these 22 images took a long time to process and piece together. But I am pretty happy with the result and I am really loving the DMK camera. Below is the result of all the work:


No comments: