Twilight Parade

I love the beauty of the crescent Moon with the faint Earthshine glowing against a slowly darkening twillight sky. When moving against a backdrop of planets, the view can be magical. And so it was on the night of Monday 26th. The three brightest objects in the sky (apart from the Sun that is!). Venus at the top, with fainter and more distant Jupiter hovering above the branches of the bush. Wonderful.

Conjunction

After several months of inactivity on the blogging front - partly due to my PC being out of action - time for a quick update.

Venus is putting on a fabulous show at the moment, shining at a brilliant magnitude -4.1. This is the conjunction with a lovely crescent moon on the 25th March, the two brightest bodies in the night sky being separated by only 3 degrees.



Earthshine



 

Perigee Moon

To the unaided eye, the full moon at perigee is, despite media hype, not noticeably larger than any "average" full moon. Never the less, it was interesting to observe as it climbed above the horizon, falsely coloured and slightly oblated due to it's low altitude, and to capture a few images of the event for the record. 
Without a useful point of reference to compare the image to, of course, the apparent 14% increase in diameter is largely meaningless.  What would be much more interesting would be to capture an image of a similar phase moon when it is at apogee, and to composite the images. This would enable a more meaningful and interesting size comparison.  So, I have the perigee image, now when is the next full moon at apogee.....?



Perigee.  19th March 2011



The Moon in Colour

This is the same image as the previous post, taken on the 16th November.  For this version, I've enhanced the colour saturation to try and show some of the differences in the surface composition. The colours are real, but our unaided eyes are normally incapable of detecting their subtlety, which is why we tend to see the familiar shades of grey.

The blue colouration indicates areas rich in titanium, in contrast to the orange areas which have a poor titanium content.

Titanium seas

Waxing Moon

Another shot later in this month's lunar cycle, taken with my DSLR.  Rather than stack a series of images, this is a single exposure with a bit of post-processing in Photoshop to adjust levels and a mild sharpen.

At this phase, the terminator can be seen cutting through the Imbrium basin, one of my favourite areas of the Moon; the highlands around Sinus Iridum just peeping above the shadows into the early morning sunlight.

Compared to the previous shot, the Mare Crisium has also clearly moved closer to the limb, showing the effect known as libration as the Moon oscillates in it's orbit around the Earth.

Still need to resurrect the scope to get some quality close-up's!

16th November

Moon 10th Nov 2010

First shot of one of my favourite targets in a long time.  Image taken with DSLR and 420mm lens. 

Exposure: 1/100 f8 ISO 200.

For a DSLR shot, I was quite pleased with the result, 'though I really need more image scale to bring out the detail. I must get my scope out of hibernation and start imaging with that I think!

4 days past new