NHS&DSFC ASTRONOMY CLUB

I was 10 years old on the day Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon. (My more mathematical students will now be doing sums in their heads!)

When I bought my first serious telescope this year I was soon looking for the Apollo 11 landing site. With a Meade ETX 105EC I could see detail down to a few kilometres. The computer controlled tracking kept the Moon in the field of view and with the hand-controller I could swoop over the surface ever though it was a quarter of a million miles away ( sorry to mix units, I know it can mean the difference between orbit and collision).

The next thing I tried was holding a digital camera to the eyepiece. I thought that camera shake would wreck my chances of getting anything decent. How wrong I was. Some of the shots on this page are from my first night's observing! However if you want to have early success make sure you know your telescope and camera well by practicing in the light. Nights of good seeing are too rare to waste trying to work out how to operate your equipment.

I use a Casio QV3500 and a Philips Toucam Pro webcam - just like the club's two webcams. The result is some shots that have a resolution of less than 5km. I have set myself the goal of capturing Hadley Rille, the lava river valley next to the site of the Apollo 15 landing, which is less than 1km across. I have seen it with the ETX 105 in very good seeing. I have also seen it through the club's 200mm Dob.

I use a range of image processing software including Corel Photo-paint, Adobe Photoshop and AIP4Win. All my images have been stored in the camera as jpegs. This makes them less suitable for processing fine detail using AIP4Win as it tends to find structure in jpeg compression artefacts. However both my Casio and the Club's Nikon 995 will output tiff files although they need 9Mb+ each. Once we all get more practiced with the cameras I am sure that the advanced programs in AIP4Win will reveal greater information in our images.

You can also have a go at stitching Moon images together into high resolution Moon maps.

The appearance of the moon is all about the angle of the Sunlight. Many raised features become more prominent when the Sun is at a lower angle. Other features, like rays, appear like magic when the angle is high. Appearances can change in an evenings viewing, particularly near the terminator (day/night line). You could take hundreds of photographs of a particular feature, each showing differences in the detail. This makes can make viewing the Moon a dynamic and exciting activity.

All these images, together with many others from the same viewing sessions are available on the Club computer. Members can use them to have a go with processing programs. Even better, use the club's equipment to get your own images and create your own 'Shooting the Moon' web page for the site.



Copernicus showing its ray system	A half Moon in natural colour. Most of the images on this page have been converted to 8 bit grey scale to eliminate colour interference.	A parabolic equalisation with AIP4Win stops burnout on light areas whilst keeping the details of craters on the terminator.	For this shot the lens was stopped down to f8. The darkening creeping across the centre of the terminator is due to the secondary mirror obstruction. Try to keep the aperture wide to eliminate this problem. A lower ISO (this was 300) would have produced less noise.


Webcam Moon Shots taken with a Philips Toucam Pro Webcam

Images of the North-west region with Copernicus. Stitched together in PowerPoint. With greater care to match the shades, a seamless image should be possible	Another image mosaic, this time of the South-west.	South-west region with Tycho. 3 Toucam images stacked with Astrostack 2 and processed in AIP

Gassendi and the Mare Humorum.	The Northern shore of Mare Imbrium showing Plato and the Alpine valley. 2 shots stacked with Astrostack and processed in Photoshop	Copernicus is a good crater to go for when it is near the terminator. Aim to capture the central peaks and the series of slumped terraces. Compare this to the view when the Sun is overhead and the crater rays become prominent.

A single image of the Tycho and Clavius region.	The same image with the two famous craters labelled	Two stacked mages of the same region but closer to the terminator. The border shows that the telescope moved between images. Astrostack can cope with a little drift but if there is too much the images will be stacked offset.

Mare Nectaris .	This image captures the same craters as the top three pictures on this page. This time they are closer to the terminator. The lower angle Sunlight highlights features that were invisible before. Two exposures have been stitched together in Photoshop. Resolution is about 3km.	Here the drift between images was too much for Astrostack to cope with. At least one of the stack is misaligned. This problem can be spotted by zooming out. You will get a cross-eyed feeling looking at the image. In this image it can also be seen that the most prominent crater, Tycho has an offset ghost image.

Even when far from the terminator ,the region where Mankind first stepped on another world can easily be spotted. The small but bright crater Moltke is just to the right of the landing site. No telescope on Earth can actually see the remains of the lunar module.		Just to the left of centre, in Mare Nubium, you will notice a line. This is known as the Straight Wall. Rather than a wall the feature appears to be a split in an old a 'ghost' crater. One side is higher than the other by about 300m.

I have now got a 200mm LX90 telescope. Here is one of the first pictures. The seeing was not very good, the surface of the moon appeared to be boiling. This is a stack of three shots.