mare – The Amazing Sky

April 26, 2015

Amazing Scenery on the Eight-Day Moon

Incredible detail stands out along the terminator of the eight-day Moon.

This was the Moon on the evening of April 26, with the waxing Moon eight days past New and one day past First Quarter Moon. It’s a great phase to explore the surface of the Moon.

In the north the arcs of the Alps and Apennine mountain ranges encircle Mare Imbrium.

In the south, craters pepper the Highlands in stark relief. Tonight, the Straight Wall was just beginning to catch the light of the rising Sun, creating a very sharp, straight shadow.

The regions along the terminator – the boundary between light and dark – at left are seeing the first sunlight in two weeks. To the right, on the more brightly lit portion of the near side of the Moon, the dark mare areas stand out in various shades of grey. Systems of rays splash out from bright, geologically fresh crater impacts.

On the technical side, this is a mosaic of two overlapping images, one for the northern and one for the southern hemisphere, taken through a Celestron C9.25 telescope at a focal length of 2300mm. I stitched them with Adobe Camera Raw’s new (as of last week’s update) ability to stitch images into a Raw-format panorama file.

March 5, 2015March 5, 2015

Copper Moon over a Copper Mine

A coppery Moon rises over the Santa Rita Copper Mine.

The March 5 Full Moon was the smallest Full Moon of 2015, the “apogee” Moon. Or call it the March mini-Moon.

I captured it rising over the vast Santa Rita Mine, east of Silver City, New Mexico, my winter home this year. The Santa Rita mine is one of the oldest continuously operating mines in western North America. I shot the scene from a viewpoint west of the city, using a 135mm telephoto lens.

The image is a composite stack of two exposures taken moments apart: a long 1-second exposure for the sky and ground (but with the Moon overexposed) and a short 1/13-second exposure for the lunar disk to retain details in the disk, like the lunar mare, marking the face of the “man in the Moon.”

Later in the evening I used my telescope to shoot a close-up of the apogee Moon. I shot a single exposure but processed it with exaggerated vibrance, saturation and contrast to bring out the subtle colour differences in the lunar mare. You can see that some are much bluer than others, due to the higher level of titanium in the lava flows that formed these mare.

As I explained in my previous blog, in seven months the Full Moon will be at the close perigee point in the Moon’s orbit, giving us the closest Full Moon of 2015. That’s also the night of a total eclipse of the Moon. I’ll try to shoot the Full Moon with the same telescope to create a big and small Moon comparison pair.

June 18, 2011

The Moon in June

On one of the few clear nights of late I took the opportunity to shoot the Moon. It’s a familiar subject to be sure, but one I don’t shoot very often. Pity really, as it is rich in detail and makes for dramatic photos.

I took this shot June 12, about 4 days before the Full Moon of June, so this is a waxing gibbous Moon. Lots of terrain (lunain?) shows up at left along the terminator, including the wonderful semi-circular bay at about 10 o’clock called Sinus Iridum. At the bottom is the bright Tycho crater, with its distinctive splash of rays spreading out across most of globe. Imagine the devastating impact that caused that feature! It isn’t that old either — estimates suggest Tycho is just 100 million years old, putting its formation smack dab in the middle of the Cretaceous Period when dinosaurs ruled the Earth. They would have seen that impact, little knowing another similar-sized impact 35 million years hence, but aimed at Earth, would do them in.

For this shot I used the Astro-Physics 130mm apo refractor with a 2x Barlow lens to increase the effective focal length to 1600mm, a combo that exactly fills the frame of the Canon 7D with no room to spare. I processed this image for high contrast, to bring out the subtle tonal and colour variations in the dark lunar seas, an effect due to different mineral content of the lava that oozed out forming the lunar plains. Judicious use of Highlight Recovery (in Camera Raw) and Shadows and Highlights (in Photoshop) brings out the detail across a subject with a huge dynamic range in brightness. A liberal application of Smart Sharpening also helps snap up detail.