Digital Astronomy from Scratch - The Moon

14 August 2003

Mare Crisium is center bottom, being eaten by the shade.

8 March 2003

I'm pretty happy with how this turned out. I took six shots with a Canon PowerShot G1 through the Televue 26MM Plossl attached to the Televue 2.5x Barlow lens. The sky was hazy, which you can see as extra glow in the lower left of the picture. I used Adobe Photoshop to combine all six images and do a bit of Sharpening. Click on the image above for the full resolution image. Of course, others have done better, but it's still rewarding to take my own pictures.The three prominent craters (all similar in diameter) near the terminator in the upper right are Theophilus, Cyrillus and Catharina.

 15 October 2000

Just a couple moon pictures. I was really after Jupiter and Saturn.

Now that I have a high-resolution digital camera instead of a Hi8 videocamera, you will see a big difference in image quality...

Click for a higher-resolution picture (or try the non-annotated version)

The moon is a couple days from full. Taken 9:35pm on 13 June 2000. It's a hot night.

I have mapped out some of the interesting features on this closeup taken the same night (13 June 2000).


Older images...

 


As the telescope pans across the moon, I let the videocamera run. Then I took several still frames and matched up their edges to get a mosaic slice of the moon.


Another mosaic slice, using the same technique as the one above. Higher power though.


The Moon, using a QuickTake camera held above a 24mm eyepiece and 2.5x Barlow.


Moon. Another image. I think I played with brightness & contrast in Photoshop.


Moon closeup. Cropped the picture, played with sharpness, brightness, contrast in Photoshop.


Moon, lower power.