Moon and Mars with Oly 100-400 + MC-14

Finally had some clear skies to test my new Olympus 100-400 on the Moon. And what a perfect opportunity with Mars and Moon conjunction.

Unfortunately, seeing was just horrible, so I could not push for longer shutter speeds. And in general the variation in detail and sharpness between each shot was quite big.

100% crop

Almost the same as above, no teleconverter. 100% crop

Scaled down a bit. It's not as sharp as it should be, I might have messed up the focus a bit (did MF on this one, I think)

I also played with High Res mode, which had no chance of working with the horrible seeing that night.

Scaled down to the same size as the normal shot above. The High Res might have a chance of working if the atmosphere was pretty stable, but with the crazy shimmering this night it had no chance of working.

And here's a comparison between vanilla 400mm and 560mm you get with a teleconverter. Both processed with exact same settings.

400mm, 100% crop

560mm, 100% crop

good work, it wasn't too good last night but at least I managed to have a quick play with single shot, focus stacking in camera and HHHR, off my monopod

Just quick grab shots before bed

Nice

Moon was up late last night, so I waited until this morning. Unfortunately, that put it right over my head, which I find is just about the hardest to hold steady. These are not great, as I was just trying to quickly see what might be achievable. And, somehow, I'd managed to get into program mode for the first batch, so there weren't many "keepers" at 1/250s. Anyway, here are one each at 560, 560DT, 800 and 800DT. These are all edited, though nothing extreme in Apple Photos. Mostly some definition, sharpening and in the case of the 800DT, noise reduction.

One interesting (to me) aspect is that with the 75-300mm, I find that my first shot in a burst is usually blurred because of my heavy finger, the others being sharp. With the 100-400 (plus the teleconverters), it seems maybe the mass of the whole setup dampens the motion from my finger press. The first shots in nearly all the bursts were (fairly) sharp, and it was the subsequent ones that were blurry. "Keeper" rate was much lower than I can achieve with the 75-300. But part of that was being in program mode too, with the slow shutter speed.

If the heat index ever gets below 100, or the humidity below soup, or when the mosquitoes decide to head south for the winter, I may get outside to really play with this. Florida.

dave rogers wrote:

Moon was up late last night, so I waited until this morning. Unfortunately, that put it right over my head, which I find is just about the hardest to hold steady. These are not great, as I was just trying to quickly see what might be achievable. And, somehow, I'd managed to get into program mode for the first batch, so there weren't many "keepers" at 1/250s. Anyway, here are one each at 560, 560DT, 800 and 800DT. These are all edited, though nothing extreme in Apple Photos. Mostly some definition, sharpening and in the case of the 800DT, noise reduction.

One interesting (to me) aspect is that with the 75-300mm, I find that my first shot in a burst is usually blurred because of my heavy finger, the others being sharp. With the 100-400 (plus the teleconverters), it seems maybe the mass of the whole setup dampens the motion from my finger press. The first shots in nearly all the bursts were (fairly) sharp, and it was the subsequent ones that were blurry. "Keeper" rate was much lower than I can achieve with the 75-300. But part of that was being in program mode too, with the slow shutter speed.

If the heat index ever gets below 100, or the humidity below soup, or when the mosquitoes decide to head south for the winter, I may get outside to really play with this. Florida.

cracking shots, especially with the 2X. Looks like good clear and clean air where you were

Thanks, Brian. I think a tripod and a little patience would yield better results, but these are encouraging.

We're near the beach, and there's little in the way of industrial sources of pollution in the immediate vicinity, mostly diesel trucks and trains, so the air is pretty clean.

It's just so frickin' hot and humid! I was actually pleased the lens didn't fog on me, I think the humidity is a little lower today. A little.

Really nice. I prefer the single frame, frankly. It's plenty sharp with no noise whatsoever.

I actually took a bunch of shots with an intention to stack them, but seeing how intense the air turbulence was, it probably is a pointless exercise.

I don't know this for a fact - I'm just guessing here, but one of the advantages of using HHHR may be that the process itself mimics stacking, and this is more important than capturing higher resolution per se.

When I shot the moon earlier in the year, I was definitely getting sharper images using HHHR than using the standard mode.

Mike

mikero wrote:

I don't know this for a fact - I'm just guessing here, but one of the advantages of using HHHR may be that the process itself mimics stacking, and this is more important than capturing higher resolution per se.

That is true for both High Res modes. And for the Moon, HHHR in general will work better because it will align the images and discard those that are too far off. At extreme telephoto range, regular HR will not be able to deal with displacement caused by natural apparent motion of the Moon.

But horrible seeing like in my case will have negative effect on HHHR as well, because of big variation is distortion in each individual frame.

Brian Wadie wrote:

...I managed to have a quick play with single shot, focus stacking in camera and HHHR, off my monopod

Could you clarify:

I think you meant ON your monopod, right. (Yeah, I know,"off" can mean "from".)

Then you did focus stacking of HHHR shots?! Or some of one, some of the other. I guess the latter. (But you didn't identify which were which.)

Have you tried HHHR from a tripod? I've been wondering if this is a cheap way to do in-camera stacking, or, even better, stacking with Bayer correction. I haven't been able to find any authoritative technical explanation of how HHHR works that tells me if it SHOULD work or not.

Both Richard's and your Photos are quite good. But Frankly, unlike Astrotipper, I prefer the stacked version. True, the craters on the light/dark edge look a bit overdone, in the stacked version, but look at Mare Imbrium (the one between Plato and Copernicus), and that area gained a lot, in clarity and definition.

Good work, both!

OK, so I was way wrong about stacking.

Single frame, prepared for stacking

Stacked with x3 drizzle, scaled down to final output resolution

Final result after extra processing. I might have overdone it a bit, but was also curious how far I could push it.

Consider me impressed.

Side note: I would probably not bother trying if not for the fact that AutoStakkert!3 seems to be working perfectly fine under Linux using Wine.

boxerman wrote:

Brian Wadie wrote:

...I managed to have a quick play with single shot, focus stacking in camera and HHHR, off my monopod

Could you clarify:

I think you meant ON your monopod, right. (Yeah, I know,"off" can mean "from".)

Then you did focus stacking of HHHR shots?! Or some of one, some of the other. I guess the latter. (But you didn't identify which were which.)

Have you tried HHHR from a tripod? I've been wondering if this is a cheap way to do in-camera stacking, or, even better, stacking with Bayer correction. I haven't been able to find any authoritative technical explanation of how HHHR works that tells me if it SHOULD work or not.

to be pedantic, I shot the moon Off the monopod as the camera was attached to it and it was the platform I was shooting off.

As described I shot a single shot of the moon,

I then switched to stacking in-camera processed

and finally I shot using in hand held high resolution setting in camera

Three separate situations described as Single Shot, focus stacking in camera and HHHR

hope that clarifies the situation for you?

No I haven't tried it of a tripod, just as described here in this "quick Play" (I don't use a tripod anymore as it doesn't suit how I like to shoot my images)

If you read the Olympus descriptions about the use of the sensor re shift in HHHR you may understand better

in the meantime try this Robin Wong video

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=how+olympus+high+resolution+hand+held+works&docid=608001145455971525&mid=DF6C572DFE8BDB8BA4DCDF6C572DFE8BDB8BA4DC&view=detail&FORM=VIRE

Wrotniak's explanation will maybe be technical enough for you?

https://www.wrotniak.net/photo/m43/em1.2-hires.html

Olympus Asia tripod hi res

Astrotripper wrote:

OK, so I was way wrong about stacking.

Single frame, prepared for stacking

Stacked with x3 drizzle, scaled down to final output resolution

Final result after extra processing. I might have overdone it a bit, but was also curious how far I could push it.

Consider me impressed.

Side note: I would probably not bother trying if not for the fact that AutoStakkert!3 seems to be working perfectly fine under Linux using Wine.

its good to play with new functionality, even better to find it works as described

And the rumor about mars being the same size as the moon is once again disproved!

Brian Wadie wrote:

boxerman wrote:

Brian Wadie wrote:

...I managed to have a quick play with single shot, focus stacking in camera and HHHR, off my monopod

Could you clarify:

I think you meant ON your monopod, right. (Yeah, I know,"off" can mean "from".)

Then you did focus stacking of HHHR shots?! Or some of one, some of the other. I guess the latter. (But you didn't identify which were which.)

Have you tried HHHR from a tripod? I've been wondering if this is a cheap way to do in-camera stacking, or, even better, stacking with Bayer correction. I haven't been able to find any authoritative technical explanation of how HHHR works that tells me if it SHOULD work or not.

to be pedantic, I shot the moon Off the monopod as the camera was attached to it and it was the platform I was shooting off.

If you don't mind my saying so, you should not feel pedantic merely trying to explain something to someone who doesn't understand.

I thank you very much for taking the time to send references. Both Wong and Wrontniak (your next reply to me) were interesting, but did not help. Wrontniac did not address hand-held versions at all, and Robin offers mostly how-to information, which I'd seen before.

I can tell you're not interested, but just in case (and in case some other reader is interested), I can be very precise what information I would like. PRACTICALLY, I'm wondering if HHHR on a tripod

1. works (giving a good HR output), 
2. gives better color (improvement re Bayer interpolation)

More specifically, many sources say that (and it makes total sense), the 16 images are aligned before merging into the final HR image. But, how are they aligned? Two possibilities. (1) they can be aligned in the way stacking software aligns different images: looking at the "content" and doing the best alignment possible. (2) they might use gyro data (from the sensors that track camera movement) BETWEEN shots, and then using that to align. A recent Oly document suggested that. The second might be easier on the processor, but I'm curious.

BUT, the critical question is whether alignment means pixel-to-pixel match, or whether the alignment "simulates" fractional pixel movement from tripod HR. I would think that it does sub-pixel off-sets between "aligned" images, but I don't know.

The practical question is whether HHHR on a tripod still gives the improvement in Bayer color improvement of (tripod) HR, or whether without the natural variations from your hand, it's just a quick way to do stacking.