Full moons are generally considered bad news for astrophotographers. Faint details in a target can easily be swamped in the strong glow of the moon, especially when considered in tandem with artificial light pollution, and seasoned lunar photographers tend to prefer the high-contrast view of shadows cast by craters. But, to my good luck, I am not a seasoned lunar photographer, and am just as impressed a full moon as the rest of the world. So why not take a break from the dim targets for a night and take a shot at the moon instead?

This image is a 13-panel mosaic, with each panel made up of around 430 1.3ms frames taken at gain 0. Captured using a ZWO ASI120MM Mini, an Svbony SV137 2x Barlow lens, and a GSO 6" F/4 mounted on a Celestron AVX. Each panel was stacked in Siril. I couldn’t find any free tools to stitch together mosaics of non-deep sky targets (Microsoft apparently had a good one according to some forum posts, but it was since discontinued), so I just did it myself in GIMP, which I also used for sharpening, padding out some corners with black, and blending some seams. Also, there’s a small patch of the moon that I didn’t capture in my mosaic, and I decided to cover up with an MS Paint tier edit because I thought it was funny. It turned out to be pretty convincing if you didn’t know where to look! See if you can find it :)