Aiming for the Moon

This year was the 40th anniversary of the first man landing on the Moon. I have been very moved by this Apollo anniversary and it got me thinking.

I first took a picture of the Moon with my Ixus during day time actually. It was pretty impressive to start seeing details I had never noticed. Then I tried with my EOS and a 300mm zoom and managed to see actual craters.

Then I realized something pretty obvious when I managed to find the name of some craters online. The features are part of reality. That's pretty obvious I agree. But it's really striking that something so remote and that can be so easily ignored in our daily lives is actually real and that I will observe the same features that other people saw hundreds of years ago.

I have started looking into how to see more detail with some image processing. It's pretty interesting actually. A common practice is to stack pictures to improve signal to noise ratio and even increase resolution.

A rather obvious way to see more detail is to get a telescope. I have found that 25inch is about the maximum that you could buy without remortgaging your home. Obsession Telescopes sells Dobsonian telescopes for 14000$. That's 7 times more than a 16inch telescope apparently, so it's not exactly affordable. That machine resolve at about a millionth of a radian which means that one can see details of about 400 meters.

I was also impressed by how much more volume and relief I saw on areas where the sunlight was almost tangential to the moon surface as it cast long shadows. This made me wonder how much more detail one could extract by combining pictures where the sunlight is coming at different angles.

Currently it's way too cold and I don't really have the time to work on image processing but I looked into using my EOS350D and a 300mm to capture a lot of images. I plan on using gphoto2 to drive the capture.
I would like to stack the pictures geometrically: I plan on tracking the moon in the pictures and assuming the camera is steady enough I would stack the pictures based on when the pictures were taken and the speed of the moon.
The main issue with this plan is to keep the camera steady as both the mirror and the shutter can cause vibrations that can cause shifts of several pixels according to comments I have seen online.
To improve the timestamping of the pictures (1 second in EXIF), I thought of recording ambient sound and detecting the shutter sound. This provides a rather obvious and cheap way of dating the frames down to a couple milliseconds.

I guess this post must be pretty boring but to me every paragraph sums up thoughts that were a lot of fun to entertain.