Category: Moon

Moon Mosaic finished at last!

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Phew! I’ve finally finished working on a large lunar mosaic from last month (Feb 19th) when the Moon was 9.5 days old with a phase of just under 69%.

I previously posted another mosaic from the same evening here which was taken with the same 130mm APO telescope and QHY5L-II camera, but at prime focus. This bigger image was taken with a 2x Barlow and, with the extra projection, gives a scale over twice the previous result. In this image, I had to stitch together over 50 images to create a full lunar mosaic. The result is about 35 mega-pixels (5700×6300), and the jpg is about 3.5 Mbytes. Please click on the following link to see the full-sized result. Please make sure to expand the image to its full size when it has finished downloading into your browser. Then you can pan around the moon.

Click here for full-size image

Below is one of the 50 or so images that were stitched together in Photoshop to create the full mosaic.

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Cruise over the Moon

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I’ve been testing a new planetary camera: the QHY5L-II.

Two nights ago, I partnered it with my recently acquired 130mm APO to produce this mosaic of the Moon. This mosaic consists of 8 images which have been ‘stitched’ together in Photoshop. Each image was taken at the prime focus of the F/7 Refracting telescope with the camera taking images at 15 fps (frames per second) at 1280 x 960 pixels.

To cruise over the Moon, please click here: http://www.astro-sharp.com/images/moon/Moon-20130219-130APO-F7-QHY5LII-IDS.jpg

Make sure you show the image at its full size, as your browser will make it fit to your screen to start with.

The image below is a very small representation of the full thing!

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Moon, Venus and Jupiter from Bath

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Took this image whilst parked on Brassknocker Hill just south of Bath. Just a bit earlier I had taken a series of killer images of the trio with Bath Abbey in the foreground with my son, Tom, only to discover that I had no memory card in the camera!

This image was about a 10 second exposure, the moon is deliberately over exposed in an attempt to pick up the stars in Orion and Taurus.

The Moon, Jupiter and Venus

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As described in my post on 22nd March this event was indeed a lovely sight yesterday evening with the young crescent moon very close to Jupiter and not far below Venus.  Take advantage of this current clear weather in the UK and watch out this evening when the Moon will be much closer to Venus

This image was taken from my garden in Ham with a Canon 350D using the standard 18-55mm lens. Setting were ISO800, f/5, 1/8th second exposure.

Young Moon joins Venus and Jupiter

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This image generated by Stellarium shows the situation from the UK, looking West, as it will be on Sunday March 25th 2012 at approximately 7:15 pm. The Moon will be a thin crescent of about 9%. Keen observers will have noticed that Venus and Jupiter have moved further apart since their beautiful conjuction last week, however this will still be a lovely event to see.

If you click on this image to see it a full size, you can see that Venus is not far below the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters which is a lovely, bright, open star cluster in Taurus. Orion, The Hunter, is just off to the East. Also notice the line on the image; This is the Ecliptic which marks the apparent path that the Sun follows through the sky over the course of the year. The planets can also be found close to the Ecliptic plane and this explains why they are also seen in the Zodiacal constellations (but don’t mention the 13th constellation of the Zodiac – Ophiuchus (The Serpent Bearer) as it upsets the astrologers!)