You’ve heard of super full moons? This is a micro almost full moon. Two weeks ago, as it eclipsed the Sun, the Moon was close to Earth. Now, it is about 10% farther away and is measurably smaller in appearance. Two weeks ago, it would not have fit in my camera’s field of view. Last night, it did. I used a 127mm Maksutov telescope at prime focus and my Canon T8i to shoot about 40 frames, which were then combined and processed in Photoshop and Topaz Photo AI.
Cedar Creek Falls Sunday morning.
I usually use Adobe Lightroom for general photography and Adobe Photoshop for astrophotography. For landscapes, I often shoot exposure bracketed so that I can combine the three images into one more balanced image. With this image, the Lightroom HDR merge option resulted in a picture with blown out highlights and crushed blacks. So, I decided to try something I have been thinking about since I was processing total eclipse photos recently. That is to use Photoshop’s, “load stack” option to align three images and put them into a smart object and then use a stack mode of “mean”. Above is the result, no crushed blacks or blown out highlights.
Pinnacle Mountain from the pond just north of it with rain on it’s way.
