Things are not always the way they seem in astronomical imaging

Things are not always the way they seem!

The scale of an image can hide a multitude of faults.

Look at this image of the 82.1% waxing, gibbous Moon.

At the scale it is presented on this page, it appears to be quite a nice image. However, clicking on it to get a closer view will start to reveal that all is not as it should be with this lunar image. Even on the maximum scale that we can get by clicking on the image, and clicking again, we only just start to see the problem. We need to look deeper to see exactly what is wrong!

The image was obtained using a Arducam circuit board in conjunction with a Raspberry Pi HQ camera. The Arducam board converts the Pi HQ camera into a USB camera. Nicola's AstroDMx Capture for Windows was used with the camera assembly and a Bresser Messier-AR-102-xs/460 ED, f/4.5 refractor mounted on a Celestron AVX mount to obtain the image data.

To see the full details of this revealing experiment, click HERE to learn more and to see the evidence in the images.

Steve Wainwright