Michael Purcell's Astrophotography

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The Moon

(Click on the picture above to go to the main image.)

This composite image of the Moon is 790x550 pixels and will take a while to decompress even though the JPEG file is only 26KB, so be patient. It is a photomosaic of 5 overlapping ST-6 images of 0.1 seconds each. Each image was processed in the usual way (see my Notes) to produce a set of partial bitmaps. I then wrote a short program in Visual Basic to load each image and drop it into the correct spot on the master image so as to appear as seamless as possible. I was pleased with the final result even though it certainly contains flaws; the two most noteworthy are that the palette grayscale assignments in each partial image do not blend perfectly, and that the brightness of the Moon caused some glow to extend into the rest of the black background. Nevertheless, it is an impressive picture.

I took this picture from my driveway.

This page last updated on March 10, 1996 Contact Michael Purcell