The Moon cast stark shadows on the ground tonight. I could easily read by its light. I did some other astrophotography, but it was pretty washed out by the brightness of the Earth’s largest satellite.
February 27, 2010
February 20, 2010
The Moon in Daytime on 2/20/10
After taking images of the Sun, the Moon peeked over my roof and I couldn’t resist getting a daytime image. I think this is the first daytime image of the Moon that I’ve taken.
The Moon on 2/19/10
I also got this shot of the Moon through my new Mak. The image doesn’t do justice to the view through the scope.
May 30, 2009
Moon on 5/29/09
Just a quick shot of the moon last night. It was a nice night, but I spent most of the time working out some kinks with the scope.
April 3, 2009
Hyperdetailed Moon on 4/3/09
Tonight was the first reasonably clear night in a couple weeks. Unfortunately, the Moon is high and very bright so I just got some bright shots of it and Saturn. Unfortunately, before I could do anything else, my telescope dewed up so I had to call it a night. It was actually just a bit too windy to do any deep sky imaging.
The image of the Moon, above, is an Autostitched panorama made from 32 images like this:
I captured each of these frames and then used the free AutoStitch software to put them together. The result is a hyper detailed image of the Moon. If you click on the Moon image, you can then click on all sizes and choose the largest size to see the detail – it’s 3337 pixels on a side, so there’s a ton of stuff to see up close!
I also took this quick shot of Saturn:
Though the evening was a bit frustrating because of the dewing up and some other issues, it was still great to get out with the scope again after a month with only a handful of observations and I’m also really pleased with the big Moon image. I hope to do more of those. Autostitch did a great job.
March 5, 2009
Lunar Mountains on 3/4/09
Tonight I just concentrated on the Moon. I particularly focused on the three mountain ranges in the image above. The Alps, Caucasus and Appanines are found among the craters of the Moon. If you click on the image, you can see a highly annotated version, noting most of the craters,seas and mountains. And if you go to the largest version, you can see a number of peaks casting their own shadows. The shadow of the rim of Crater Plato in the upper left is really quite interesting. The crazy thing is that as detailed as this image is, it’s much more detailed through the eyepiece.
I also got a shot of the Moon in its entirety:
February 7, 2009
The Moon on 2/7/09
Despite using the cheap scope, the Moon still looks good. I’m hoping to get a few more good Moon shots in the coming days, particularly over the ocean.
Moon over the Atlantic
Here’s the Moon rising over the Atlantic Ocean. In the next couple days I’m hoping to get a shot of it low on the water in the dark.
Here’s the telescope I’ve been using while at the beach:
January 30, 2009
The Moon on 1/30/09
Tonight’s Moon was really pretty, hovering above Venus in the west.
Here’s yesterday’s Moon:
And here’s Venus:
January 7, 2009
Bright Stuff on a Windy Night
It’s been so rainy and cloudy that I haven’t had the scope out since the first of the year. Today the clouds pretty much went away and I set up the scope. Because of the brightness of the Moon and the light wind, I decided to get images of just bright stuff. The first item on my list was Mercury which is the higher of the two planets visible in the west just after sunset. Mercury through the scope looked like it was a quarter moon shape, though it was hard to tell through all of its wavering in the atmosphere. It really doesn’t show up that well in this image either, but it’s nice to bag it when I can.
Next up was Venus. Venus is clearly a half-moon now and will shortly start showing a crescent. It’s much more interesting in the scope than Mercury because it’s higher in the sky so it wavers less and it’s much larger so its shape is much clearer.
Finally I started imaging the Moon which is very bright this evening. While getting the images for this picture, the wind started blowing fiercely and I began to worry about the stability of my scope so as soon as I finished the image, I took everything down. Hopefully tomorrow will be clear as well, but a lot less windy.
