Capturing a hidden world above Us: First Moon mosaic

My very first attempt of imaging Moon this way, taking videos systematically, process every video by stacking the frames. In this case I had 5 frames (from 5 videos) to stitch together.

Moon details

Moon was in constellation Gemini.Visual magnitude was -10.7, apparent size of 31.2 arcmin.
71.9% of its nearside surface was illuminated, distance from Earth 382 945 km.
54° above horizon.

Processing

Well because it was my very first try, I did not want to waste too much effort in case if all my work goes to bin :)

So I sort of stayed along the terminator - the dividing line between the illuminated and unilluminated area of the Moon to see what can I get out of it.

My project proved to be a great success, as putting the frames on top of each other I realized, all the knowledge I have gained during the last 2 years about post processing payed off eventually. Because all the frames need to look the same, can't be different in contrast or any other factors that might ruin the smoothness of the final result.

So here are the five original frames, after I did the stacking in AS2 and Wavelets in Registax.

Then I used Photoshop to cut off the edges of each frame, they show some stacking errors there and we don't need that at all. After that simply layering the frames on each other, creating the full size photo mosaic. When it was done, did some post processing, contrast, brightness, clarity etc...

After all the hard work a smile suddenly appeared on my face :) My Moon looked like this:

But I love to create something useful, mainly for myself to learn from when the sky is couldy, but of course for sharing too :)

So found a good Moon map and began to mark the most important features (to me) on my photo. Also all the visible landing site of the Apollo program - Apollo 11, 15, 16 and 17...

Voila... !