Imaging is now becoming a major branch of the hobby, and a good feature of lunar and planetary imaging is that it can be done under light-polluted skies. It does not have to be expensive, as DSLRs and even iPhones can be used to image the Moon and, perhaps surprisingly, DSLRs can even be used to image the planets. Webcams are now routinely used for planetary imaging and can also be used to produce stunning lunar images. All of these possibilities are fully covered in this chapter.

Image Processing Programs

Virtually all images can be improved with the use of some post-processing in an image manipulation program such as Adobe Photoshop Elements or Adobe Photoshop and a freeware program such as GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program).

It has to be said that the majority of astro-imagers use Adobe Photoshop , and packages of ‘actions’ specii cally designed to help process astro-images can be used with it. It is expensive, but bona i de students can purchase it for signii cantly less. Might it be worth signing on at a local college for an evening course in Photoshop use? Adobe Photoshop Elements is considerably cheaper and can carry out some of the image manipulation functions that are used, but it works only in 8-bit mode (whereas Photoshop can handle 16-bit images) and it does not have the curves function, which can be very useful for ‘stretching’ the brightness of an image to bring out detail in, for example, the spiral arms of a galaxy, which are far less bright than the central core.