More Moon...

In the last post, besides illustrating the size difference in the moon between its closest and furthest point, I also talked about the subtle colors of the moon.  I mentioned that color-enhancing the mosaic from the Celestron 14" didn't work - evidently the mosaic software made minor color changes to blend together the frames of the composite.  Well, I went through and reprocessed the frames, enhancing each of the composite frames before assembly, and it seemed to work better...

While it worked better, it still isn't perfect!  As shown at left, the 6-frame mosaic (each composed of 5 stacked frames) appears to have color gradients in them, but other than use a smaller telescope to take a full-frame image rather than a mosaic, not sure where else to go with this...

At least the above is slightly better than the version I mentioned before, where the color saturation is turned up on the assembled mosaic.  While I cranked it a little extra to show the "paisley" background pattern, you can see it is obviously wrong too, picking up subtle color changes from the mosaic software.  There are some agreements with the above frame, but there are some issues with the lower center section of the mosaic.  As noted in the previous post, color differences represent differing chemical abundances.  The blue color especially indicates a higher concentration of titanium...

While easily showing up by cranking the saturation in Photoshop, any of the color variations are tough to pick up visually.  But I'll keep trying and try to get some more uniform and repeatable results...