I'm hoping that this thread will encourage people to break out of their comfort zone when it comes to light pollution whether that be from the moon or a man-made source.  

Today's modern CMOS cameras are truly remarkable tools and we can capture amazing details with very short exposures.  It doesnt take much to get above the noise floor, and if you couple that with modern techniques for gradient removal, it's quite amazing what can be accomplished under less than ideal conditions.  

I see over and over and over where people say that they can't achieve a certain type of image due to their skies or that they are unwilling to image when there is any kind of moon out.  Very recently someone was talking about how it's not even worth imaging with narrowband filters when the moon was over 50%!  To me that is just nonsense.  I live in the northeast USA and my weather is just terrible for astronomy.  If I only imaged when conditions were ideal... I'd NEVER image.  Because my weather is not very condusive to astronomy, I image when I get the opportunity.  So I've made a bunch of images at and around the full moon, and while the moon certainly makes it more challenging, it's not impossible!   Decent results are quite achievable!

My light pollution is not that bad, I live on the edge of B3/B4.  Vermont's largest city, Burlington is only a few miles to my East and within a 30 minute drive we have a population of about 250,000 people.  So it's not like some of you city dwellers, but it's also not like I live at a dark site.  I can't see the milky way from my yard during the new moon... well, maybe there is a little bit of a smudge, but it's not spectacular like the night skies I've seen up in the Maine North Woods.

What inspired me to write this, is that I recently made an image of the Iris Nebula and surrounding field.  I collected about 3 hours of color data and about 3 hours of luminance.  Data was collected just after the new moon, and was very nice.  I didnt quite get the colors I wanted so I waited for another clear night.  That was two nights ago during an 82.5% moon.  The moon rose before sunset and set at around 1:30 AM.  I was able to capture 43 subs of 180 seconds each of Red, Green and Blue.  My target went behind some trees at 4:00 AM, so most of this data was from when the moon was bright in the sky.  Total integration time was 6.45 hours.  I did not capture any Luminance Data.  The sky looked like milk, or soup, or your favorite opaque liquid.  

Scope was the Epsilon 160ED.  So yes, a fast scope, but remember that despite being f3.3, this scope has a central obstruction and has about 45% light fall off across my sensor.  So it's fast, but not revolutionary.  So mabye a couple of nights of data with an average telescope could achieve a similar result.  

So, here it is.  82.5% moon with broadband data.  No other data, just what was captured under that big bright moon.

Don't be afraid of the moon!  With a modern camera and decent processing, it's amazing what is possible!