I headed out this evening to enjoy the skies without the camera, however, after training my binoculars on the moon it seemed worthy of another attempt.
The moon is currently ‘waxing gibbous’, meaning it’s growing from 1st quarter (or half moon to you and I) to second quarter/full moon. Confused? This helps explain. The result is some nice contrasty detail around some of the craters which I think compares favourably with my first attempt:
Imaging Data:
Canon EOS 300D at prime focus
8 x 1600th second (underexposed 1 stop using TTL camera metering)
Aligned and stacked in Registax v6
White balance corrected to Auto in Photoshop
There is a nice view of a semi-circular mountain ridge (Montes Jura) at the top left. The Copernicus crater, some 58 miles across stands out nicely below that, almost half-way down. On closer inspection many of the craters display peaks in the middle, created by the rebound of the lunar surface following meteor impacts.
The evening was rounded off by going back to my book of ‘Messier’ objects (an 18th century directory of ‘not-comet’ objects), and searching out the open star cluster M37 in Auriga. Not hugely spectacular, but perhaps a bit washed out by moonshine tonight. Will look for the nearby M36 and M38 clusters on another evening. (postscript – I think I went to M36 not M37 – must try harder!).