Earthlit Moon
The image presented on this page is a very complicated composition of 21 images. The first problem was
the movement of the Moon relatively to the solar corona during the eclipse. For that reason it was
necessary to align the solar corona and the Moon separately. The phase correlation method, which I use
routinely for reliable alignment of the solar corona, turned out unusable for the alignment of the Moon.
The reason was that the edge of the Moon was missing on the images with long
exposure times because of the CCD chip saturation. That is why I was forced to use the alignment
based on identifying formations on the lunar surface. As soon as I had solved the alignment problems,
another problem emerged. The extreme brightness gradient near the lunar edge caused by diffuse light
was necessary to be removed in order to make the faint lunar formations visible. I tried several methods
without any acceptable results. Finally I had to write a dedicated program for this particular purpose.
Click on the image or on the following reference to display the
higher resolution image version (1.0 MB, PNG format).
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| Image | Ecl2001_dd_mo.png |
| Date | 21. 06. 2001 |
| Time | 2nd contact 13:09:02 UT, 3rd contact 13:12:33 UT
Total eclipse duration 3 min 31 s |
| Place | Zambia |
| Coordinate | 14° 48' 05.1'' S, 28° 03' 29.4'' E, alt. 1198 m |
| Conditions | Altitude of the Sun above the horizon: 31° |
| Optics | Astrophysics "Traveler" 105 mm / 610 mm equipped with 1.4x-converter TC-14 (Nikon) and a field-flattening lens of Astrophysics, effective focal length 917 mm |
| Camera | Nikon D1H digital camera |
| Exposure | 1× 1/4000 s, 1× 1/1000 s, 1× 1/250 s, 1× 1/60 s, 3× 1/8 s, 10× 1/4 s, 1× 1/2 s, 1× 1 s, 2× 2 s, |
| Processing | Composition of 21 images. Images were aligned by means of phase correlation (solar corona) and using ACC Match II module (Moon), composed by means of LDIC 1.0 software, processed using Corona 3.0 in order to visualize coronal structures. Final processing was done using ACC 6.0 software.
Image processing by Miloslav Druckmüller |
| Software | PhaseCorr 3.0, LDIC 1.0, Corona 3.0, Sofo ACC 6.0 |
| Orientation | Image must be rotated 44.2° clockwise to achieve the standard orientation (N top, E left) |
| Copyright | © 2001 Friedhelm Dorst, © 2005 Miloslav Druckmüller |
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Miloslav Druckmüller
Institute of Mathematics, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering
Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic
druckmuller@fme.vutbr.cz
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Page last update: 27.11.2019
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