The pictures were taken on the morning of Saturday 11th January 2020.
Each of these pictures was made by summing a number of separate exposures.
The advantage of that is that it allows the colour contrast to be increased without the colour quantisation of the individual pictures becoming apparent.
I probably took far more separate exposures than was necessary, especially for wide angle shots, where the colour contrast didn't really need to be increased.
The more zoomed-in a shot is, the less light was falling on each pixel of the detector so the exposure times and ISO had to be increased to compensate.
I actually took about 300 exposures for each of the zoomed-in shots but had to reject a lot of them because the wind blowing on the telescope was wobbling the picture.
The reason why the zoomed-in pictures are smaller than the others is because the movement of the telescope reduced the overlap between all of the separarate exposures.
For the video, the pictures at the eight different zoom levels had their colours adjusted so that they matched each other. That way, they could be blended together without the joins being too visible. Then for each frame of the video, an image was formed from those pictures and the colours were altered again so that the visible part of the scene looked good. On this page, each of the eight pictures has had its colour adjusted to approximately match what the video looked like when that picture was full screen. You can click on any image to see it at its original resolution. Some of the large pictures have been saved at a low quality because there might still be a 1MB file size limit on this server. |