Waxing

A bright, clear crescent Moon did shine down last night, and with a young man interested in seeing through the big scope, I stirred myself to grant his wish. While looking at the ancient surface, I noticed that the seeing was pretty good, so got the camera mounted for a few snaps.

There's nothing groundbreaking about a pic of the crescent Moon, of course, but it's always pleasing and never looks the same twice—unless you wait a long time and look at every possible opportunity. On this occasion though, there was a pinprick of light inside a large crater, evidence of day breaking upon a central mountain peak ... and who doesn't like a mountain sunrise?

The telescope is effectively acting as a 1200mm f8 long lens, which is pretty big on a crop sensor camera (Canon 40D). At ISO-400, the exposure would be reasonably short, except that I wanted to make the most of that little sunlit mountaintop, so took exposures of 1/13, 1/25, 1/50, 1/100 and 1/200 second, to get detail in both highlights and dark areas near the terminator (the day/night boundary). I then combined all 5 exposure levels to make an HDR image.

The southern highlands, at top, appear more heavily cratered as they haven't been overlaid with lava,which process produced the dark 'seas' in the northern hemisphere.

 

Maurolycus, with central peak lit

The crater trio Catharina, Cyrillus and Theophilus, beside the Sea of Nectar

 

Sea of Tranquility; Apollo 11 site circled

 

3 Phases of The Moon

I've been taking photographs and stargazing for a long time; inevitably, those two pursuits cross paths now and then. It might be a startrails pic, a guided exposure of a comet, or something a bit more whimsical.

Delving into the archives, I took a moon photo from circa 1984, and played with it a bit to create this image. I'm not divulging the recipe, but you won't find it as a simple Photoshop tool! Actually, I'd probably find it difficult to reproduce myself; sometimes I 'explore' an image, making derivative copies, modifying and combining them in different ways until I create something that looks a bit interesting. Usually, I leap rapidly from one transformation to the next, without recording exactly what I've done, so the end result is usually unreproducable. One such exploration, that I didn't save in the end, produced some images that looked like an aged Daguerreotype, and to some extent I was trying to recreate that here.

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