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The Moon

Lunar Eclipse 2007

I saw my first lunar eclipse in February of 2007. I imaged it with the Celestron NexImage camera and my C8-N Newtonian reflector from my driveway. I also streamed the live video being captured to a bunch of friends around the country from Glasgow to Surrey and Wiltshire. It was a fantastic sight and the skies stayed clear well into the early hours when it was just me and a few hedgehogs drinking beer watching the eclipse end 

The hues kept changing while I was filming the eclipse and I was often unsure whether the saturation was set too high – probably was but it was close to this pink colour seen in these shots.

Our Moon

My favourite Moon is a crescent being lit by the setting Sun (as above). I was also able to use a new dslr to take the shot of the entire face of the Moon – something I can’t do with the telescope setup I have.

Lighting is the fundamental factor to consider when imaging the Moon – the atmosphere of any shot can change from one moment to the next as the Sun rises/sets. It’s critical to view the Moon when the Sun’s rays are hitting the craters and features at an angle throwing shadows across the surface to reveal detail.

Zooming in on the Moon

There are 3 main sights any newcomer to amateur astronomy needs to see – Saturn, Jupiter (and it’s Moons) and a highly magnified image of the craters on our Moon. It’s probably the most awe inspiring image you’re likely to see through the eyepiece of any scope.

A few shots of Copernicus’ crater here – amazing site through the eyepiece.

The final image above is of Crater Copernicus with a few ejecta rays shooting up from the Crater Tycho below. The Moon looks a bit like a shooting range in this one!

Taken in December 2011 this mosaic is a composed of 4 shots taken with my 254mm Newtonian telescope and the Celestron NexImage camera with a 2x barlow.

A map to help you find your way around the Moon

Venus

…move along, nothing to see here :-)

Venus may be a beautiful morning/evening star but it’s a real dud when you look at with a telescope – surface detail is pretty much non-existent but it’s various phases can be interesting.

Sun

Our star

The images above are really quite bad compared to what I know the equipment I have is capable of but I had fun trying :-)

Mars

Close approach 2010

Mars coming as close as it did was a golden opportunity to grab some surface detail in these images – unfortunately I haven’t quite got the hang of this camera yet so I had mixed results – but interesting to see detail at all I guess.

Jupiter

The planet King

One of Jupiters bands disappeared a couple of years ago but has now thankfully returned – the multiplication of Arthur C. Clarkes monoliths once again having been interrupted by unknown forces har har. This is my favourite image to date – it’s slightly under processed so there’s a bit more detail in it but I liked this more subtle rendering.

I’ve never really been able to capture Jupiter and any of its moons in the same shot as the shutter speed has to be so low to get them that Jupiter is usually washed out. However, I used the Celestron C10n with its 254mm aperture to finally get a shot with some surface detail on Jupiter – the large aperture and light gathering capacity of this scope meant the faint moons were defined at higher shutter speeds.

Saturn

Tilting rings

Due to the angle of our orbits Saturn’s rings periodically close up and appear edge on – this happened recently and it demonstrated in the images above.

Uranus

A pale blue dot

I’ve tried for many years to see Uranus and then finally, while I was setting everything up to image Jupiter I noticed that it would be in view – just – from my observatory where I could use the C10n to capture it’s faint blue features. It doesn’t look like much but the distances involved fascinated me and the fact that I could see its distinct colour and make out the disc with a 4mm eyepiece was equally inspiring.

Earth

Skyscapes

I read a quote once that said “..we don’t take pictures of what we see – we take pictures of what we want to see..” I hope this applies to my overzealous use of the processing tools! The tree above is very lightly processed where the clouds on the right don’t look anything like the real sky that day, but I liked it better this way :-)