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Community photo entitled  by Alexandru Barbovschi on 11/09/2022 at Chisinau, Republic of Moldova

On 11/09/2022 10:00 pm by Alexandru Barbovschi| Chisinau, Republic of Moldova

I've wanted to shoot Moon with my color astrocamera for some time now and recently got a good reason to do so - got myself a new Barlow lens (Baader 2.25x). Also, I still had the borrowed TeleVue 2.5x, so it was a perfect occasion to make a test drive of several Barlow lens! Got lucky in the evening of that day, with properly clear skies, so I've set out and tried out three Barlows. Here are my conclusions:
1. Focusing on a star with Bahtinov mask will yield the best sharpness on the Moon (to prove that I've also shot by focusing manually). An important note here - always use a proper assistant for the job (for example the original Bahtinov Grabber application);
2. Out of three Barlows (Omegon 2x / Baader 2.25x / TeleVue 2.5x), the most juicy color I've got out of Baader 2.25x, which was surprising;
3. TeleVue 2.5x is truly telecentric (aka does not change the magnification factor depending on the distance to the sensor) and has the best color correction (both Omegon and Baader, despite being labeled as APO, suffer from the issues in the green channel, which were a bit tricky to hide in the post-processing);
4. Omegon 2x is actually behaving as a 2.23x Barlow;
5. Baader 2.25x is actually behaving as a 2.86x Barlow. This is actually a pleasant surprise - it covers nearly in its entirety the sensor of my ASI533MC!
6. Processing Moon without the need to assemble panoramas is so much easier and much more precise (less artifacts in the final image). This is especially relevant for me, as I was previously shooting with a monochromatic camera (aka I had to shoot per each channel separately, greatly increasing the amount of effort required to obtain the final result).
7. As I've also shot Mars that evening with the same Barlows - TeleVue is the best for the job, hands down (though considering the big price gap and not so radical difference in the end result - that's a hard pill to swallow).

Shot on a Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer mount, through a Sky-Watcher Evostar 72ED (72/420mm) OTA and Baader Classic Q 2.25x Barlow (effective magnification turned out to be 2.86x), using ZWO ASI533MC Pro (7ms / 190 gain / 0 degrees Celsius / 19.9fps / 60s).

Pre-processed using PIPP, stacked using AutoStakkert! 3. RGB channels split using Siril, each of them (and also the original non-split image) sharpened using ImPPG. PlanetarySystemLRGBAligner used for fine alignment of all 4 images. Siril to combine separate channels back into RGB and RawTherapee to post-process it. L channel (which is the previously sharpened original non-split image) was added using GIMP. Final post-processing was done using RawTherapee.