The videos from which each frame of the animation was prepared were taken between 6:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. EDT on November 12, 2010. They were 90 seconds in duration, and were taken using the program FireCapture at an exposure of 16 milliseconds and a frame rate of 60 frames per second as raw undebayered 8-bit .AVI files. A Flea3 color webcam was used for the capture. This camera has a 640x480 array of 5.6 micron pixels with a Bayer color filter mask. The camera was coupled to my 7.25-inch f/14 Schupmann medial telescope with a 2x Barlow lens and a short extension, giving an effective focal ratio of f/35. The raw 8-bit .AVI files were debayered using the Adaptive Smooth Hue algorithm in the Debayer Tool provided by Torsten Edelmann with his FireCapture software to give 24-bit RGB video files. Each frame of the animation is a stack prepared from the best 1,500 frames of each video, sharpened using wavelets and minimal histogram stretching in RegiStax 5.

Final adjustment of the histogram, color balance, and centering of the images was done in Photoshop.

Ray Shapp combined all ten images to produce the animated GIF.