Taken at prime focus of a 1200 mm FL, 254-mm newtonian. Mosaic of 3 stacked images, assembled with photoshop. This is my second night with the camera.
The ASI178 requires a powerful laptop! With a core I3 / 4GB /Win 8.1 I was led to reduce the max FPS in SharpCap. At FPS max numerous frames were dropped (7ms exposures with red filter, full size 3k x 2k, 8 bits).
I noticed some black columns on darkest areas (maria). They were wiped out with the help of a bit of denoising. This is the only case where such rows appeared. Random black points were also visible in raw frames but they also vanished with stacking. In all cases the noise cannot be compared to my old, very noisy QHY5 (MT9M001 sensor) nor with the ASI120MM. The sensor spontaneously cooled down to 5°C. The stacked images are extremely clean and, of course, very large. Stacking lasted hours (Avistack) but processing was very quick.
The turbulence was noticeable despite the height of the Moon. Long-focal imaging was nearly impossible during the remaining of the night. I gave up after 30mn of re-collimation then 30mn of pointless focusing.
I'm very satisfied with the ASI178MM, it is perfectly suited to wide-angle lunar imaging as long as the focal is not too long because of the very, very tiny photosites. My DSLR is now useless :)
