Stacking the Moon with the Tamron SP 500/8

Two days before full moon in September 2007 i wanted to try the Tamron SP 500/8 against the moon. Armed with an adapter for Olympus OM to Canon EOS, a Tamron 1.4 TC (EOS) and a good solid Manfrotto tripod i set out for - well - just the garden.



With the combination of Canon's 30D Body and the TC, the whole setup compares to a 1120mm lens at about f/11 or more.

To avoid any shaking i used a remotecontrol and mirror lock-up. After some test shots i took a whole series - to be exact, 27 images of the moon. And the shooting session was already over.


Here is one sample, 1/160 @ iso 500. 50% cropped. (click for 1:1 size)


Here the same 100% cropped. (click for 1:1 size)

Well the quality is not that impressive, but for starters it's ok.

This is where "Stacking" and the 27 images fits in.

Using the Software Autopano pro i stacked all the images into one image.


From this image (click for 1:1 size), which looks blurred, you are able to sharpen your way to a much better image of the Moon. But you'll need the right software, i used the freeware Registax 4.

Registax has the wavelet sharpener, which really improves the sharpness of your Moon photo.

Sharpening is always a bad idea due to the, in the process, introduced grains. But with the help of Noise Ninja you can make this picture worth looking at.


Here we see the original and the Wavelet sharpened images plus Noise Ninja.


And this is the 100% cropping. (click for 1:1 size)

As you can see, much more detail is available from all these shots as just from one image. One thought came to me during the processing: Why not resize the 27 images from 8 megapixel to 32? Then stack these monsters and do the Wavelet and Noise Ninja, the result must be much better, right?

Well i tried it.


The first image is the original 8mp, the second is the 8mp with wl+nn and the last is the 32mp with wl+nn scaled back down to 8mp!

I must say it's much better. But this seems to be the limit, a least with 27 images. The downscaling of the end picture has a nice sideeffect, it reduces the grains times 4.


This is the end result, scaled down to 33,3% of the 32 mp image and cropped.

Links

• Read more about Stacking with Autopano Pro
• Get the Registax 4 software - freeware
• Check out the Noise Ninja Software from Picturecode