Copernicus

Despite rather ordinary seeing conditions (which made the moon dance around like mad when viewing it on the computer through the webcam) I wanted to shoot Copernicus as it seemed to be at its best. Below is the best shot from the night.

I got a bit fancy-pancy with this one. The shot itself is the result of 1,790 out of 3,000 frames shot at 15 frames per second. However, I also took the equivalent of a dark frame by shooting an .AVI file through the scope with the lens cap on. I then averaged the frames that were extracted out of the dark .AVI file and then used layers in GIMP to merge the two together.

The result is just fine. If seeing conditions were more stable this may have come out a lot better. Still, you can see some rather nice detail, especially with string of smaller craters at lower left.