Waning gibbous moon in exaggerated color -- clean image. Photo by Ari Heinze.

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The waning gibbous moon appears here in enormously exaggerated color and yet in a clean, fairly low-noise image -- the result of merging 4 individual frames in Photoshop. Subtle color variations due to differences in the chemical composition of the lunar rocks can be seen in detail. A dead, gray world at first glance, the moon still possesses enormous variety.

Date/Time	February 19, 2011, about 22:55 CST
Equipment	Home-built eight-inch F/5 Newtonian telescope plus Nikon D3000 DSLR
Settings	Telescope stopped to about F/20 using cardboard mask. Film speed set to 100 ISO. Single-frame exposure time 1/15 sec; 4 frames stacked for a total equivalent exposure of 4/15 = 0.27 sec (though the frames were merged by averaging so that the longer exposure produces lower noise rather than a brighter image). White balance auto.
Image processing	Cropped; 4 individual frames stacked as varying-transparency layers and then merged in Adobe Photoshop; color saturation enormously increased; resized for web to 1500 pix width.
Image dimensions before resizing	2316x1800
Focus	Good: almost no blurring visible even in the full-resolution raw image.
Motion blur	Negligible
Image noise	Low to moderate -- reduced by stacking of 4 individual images.
Other technical comments	None.

Copyright 2011 Ari Heinze: all rights reserved.

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