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The moon doesn't let itself be pixel shifted

DrLex

Well-Known Member
I thought I'd be able to get more detailed 300mm shots of the moon by using the OM-5 pixel shift. However, when the moon is the only thing in the frame, the camera will fail to combine the images in hand-held mode, even when shooting from a tripod with remote control. When something else truly stationary is in the frame as well, it will generate the high-res image and the stationary thing will be sharp, but distortions will be visible on the moon (especially at the edges) and it will not really be any sharper than when upscaling a regular 20MP shot. Same when using the 80MP tripod mode, it does generate the high-res but it contains distortions and isn't really sharp. It appears the moon is simply moving too fast at 300mm FL.
I thought that when the moon is the only non-uniform thing in the whole frame, the hand-held mode might be able to compensate for its slight movement, but apparently this mode relies on something else as reference points than merely the image content, and it notices that the shots do not line up as expected.
I guess it would be possible by mounting the camera on a tracking tripod that follows the moon's motion perfectly smoothly, but then it probably makes more sense to buy a decent telescope instead, or take a burst shot and feed those frames to some external super-resolving tool, exploiting the movement of the moon itself to act as the pixel shift.

Moon-pixelshift.jpg
 
The difficulty with HHHR is a moon only shot has blackness all around it resulting in no alignment points for the camera to align and stack. Although when the moon is large enough in the frame, it will stack successfully. Pixel shift with fast shutter speed should work okay. The difficulty is a really stable tripod at that focal length - needs a remote shutter and have to anticipate as the moon enters the frame.
 
NB there really is a tiny star or two in there, somwhere.

Also if you want to sharpen and de-noise, try Topaz AI, it works fairly well on terrestrial subjects.
 
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