Image 1: Earth’s Moon from Lac Teeples, October 1, 2023
Image 2: Jupiter from Lac Teeples, October 1, 2023
My telescope is not normally set up for planetary astronomy. The RASA telescope is poor for this application. I have a good scope for this but it is an effort to swap them. With the long weekend (“Truth and Reconciliation Day”) and a full-moon, not to mention clear skies, the time was ripe. I changed over to a Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope with a much longer focal length, good for the Earth’s moon and planets in our solar system.
The Earth’s moon was nearly full when this image was captured: It was around 95% illumination. That is NOT the best time to image the moon because the sun’s light is directly facing it and there are fewer shadows. Like a portrait the light is best coming at a bit of an angle.
I have some very good pictures of the Earth’s moon but this one is definitely the best. I took a video with 1000 frames and then selected the best 4% of those (40 frames) and stacked these. This way we toss the frames most affected by atmospheric seeing. The full image almost captures all of the target but it is a bit too big. Images 3 and 4 below are crops showing more and more detail.
The Jupiter image was produced in a similar fashion. 1000 images in a video, best 4% used. I have not captured any decent image of Jupiter prior to this, so it is definitely a first. Earlier in the evening I could see the big storm on Jupiter but it had rotated out of view by the time I was ready for serious imaging.
Image 3: Earth’s Moon from Lac Teeples, October 1, 2023. Crop showing Mares Crisium and Tranquility.
Image 4: Earth’s Moon from Lac Teeples, October 1, 2023. Further Crop showing Mare Crisium.
Image 5: Wikipedia commons map of Lunar features. Mare Crisium is at the upper right.
Mare Tranquillitatis was the landing site for the first crewed landing on the Moon on July 20, 1969. “Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed”.
Images captured at Lac Teeples on October 1, 2023. Camera was the ZWO ASI-6200MC, Telescope was the antique 14” Celestron SCT. No filters used.
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