The session can be described quickly: I rarely set up my equipment solely to photograph the Moon. This time was no different-before the actual deep-sky session, which I believe was focused on Messier 101, I captured the Moon with about 150 individual frames each, using three different exposure times.
This time, I wanted to focus on the dark side of the Moon because of the thin crescent. So, similar to classic HDR photography, I captured the bright and dark sides of the Moon separately-taking about 150 images for each side.
During the editing process, I tried to combine the two different areas separately in Autostakkert. As expected, this worked well for the crescent. Unfortunately, the dark side was still underexposed and too dark, so I had to use a single frame for that part. There will be a second attempt.
I then combined both images in Affinity Photo using layer and masking techniques. Depending on your screen and the ambient brightness, you can see the light reflected from Earth quite well on the dark area of the Moon.
