Lunar Blueprints
The northwest quadrant of Earth’s Moon, viewed during morning daylight reveals many wonderful details with an appearance that differs from nighttime views in more than just color. A few points of interest: The crater with impressive ejecta rays at lower left is Kepler; to its right is large, distinctive Crater Copernicus with its central peaks. Just above Copernicus are the peaks of Montes Carpatus. The bright spot at upper left is Crater Aristarchus with Herodotus, just to its left. Finally, at the upper right corner, is the distinctive C-shape of Sinus Iridium.This morning, before stowing equipment for the duration of upcoming days of cloudy weather, we aimed the 11-inch scope at Earth’s waning gibbous Moon. Images were captured at about 7:50 AM EDT, after the sky had turned to blue, lending its color to Moon as viewed from Earth.
Celestron 11-inch telescope is shown aimed at Moon — a tiny white dot — in the clear, blue morning sky. The big Celestron SCT remains in need of adjustment or, possibly, overhaul but does deliver some pleasing results! We’ve been struggling but have not yet achieved best acceptable collimation, so the scope hasn’t spent much time on the permanent pier in the observatory.
The sort of flaw that one will see from telescopes that are out of collimation — alignment of the light path within the telescope — is stars that look a bit like comets, and focus difficulties. After several efforts we are not where we need to be with the C11 to use it as our primary observatory instrument.
Unfortunately, due to lack of space, we can have only one telescope at a time on a permanent mount beneath the dome. We are considering next steps which include acquisition of a new primary telescope, upgrading of the mount, and means of mounting two instruments at a time on the pier.
As mentioned, cloudy, rainy weather is expected to be the rule for the week ahead so the telescope is parked, and accessories stowed. We’ll be working a bit on our meteor camera and thinking about where to go from here.
Our favorite image from the morning’s “Daytime Moon” efforts shows Moon’s heavily-bombarded southwest quadrant: craters, within craters, within craters. As with the other blue sky image shown here, this one is darker and more vivid than its actual appearance; we couldn’t resist giving the picture a bit more “snap” to bring out detail. This image of the northwest quadrant of Earth’s Moon shows the image as a photographic negative — amber in color, not blue as in a previous post. Ejecta rays are especially visible around Crater Kepler, near the center of this picture. We enjoy images like this because they feel like a throwback to the early days of astrophotography, and because they tend to reveal delicate details — I mean, just look at the ejecta rays around the craters, especially Kepler just below center of this picture.
#2026 #astronomy #astrophotography #blue #blueMoon #celestron #daytime #moon #moonjoy #observatory #science #space #telescopes
3i/Atlas
Stella-Luna Observatory
Rick Kenobi
Cédric Vanden Driessche
JD Gadina
JD Gadina 🦄
