Moon Images
Discussion
During the period from July 16th to July 31st, 2005, the Southern Bay Area was blessed with a string a extremely clear nights which allowed to take 15 consecutive images of the moon. The instrument used was an Orion Apex 102mm Maksutov-Cassegrain Telescope, mounted on an AZ-3 (alt-az) mount with a Celestron 32 mm Plossl eyepiece and a Konica Minolta DImage Z2 camera. All images before the night between the 23rd and 24th were taken by manually holding the camera to the eyepiece. Afterwards, I used an Orion SteadyPix adapter which allowed me to take longer exposures of earthshine and star clusters.
The moon rises approximately 45 minutes later every night, and at my house the moon (actually all objects near the ecliptic) must rise over a hill. When one considers that it takes between 15 minutes and a half hour to take a sufficient number of images to be assured a reasonably clear one, I finished imaging approximately 90 minutes after the actual moonrise time. As a result, near the end of the project I had to stay up until 3:30 AM to image the moon and I wasn't getting to bed until around 4:00 AM. I always tried to image the moon as late as practically possible so as to limit heatwaves and minimum the amount of atmosphere the moonlight had to travel through.
The images below are those that I subjectively judged as best for each given night. The DImage Z2 does not have a raw mode so they were acquired on the best JPEG setting. Almost all had a brownish orange tint so I adjusted levels in Photoshop and ran an Unsharp Mask to bring out more detail.
Images
Notes: Dates given above each
image refer to the night that the photo was taken with the bold
indicating which side of midnight the image was taken on. For instance
"July 20th to 21st" means that
the image was taken on the 20th before midnight. I use this method to
avoid confusion. Otherwise, it is unclear if an image taken on a
specific date was taken early in the morning (1 AM) or late at night
(11 PM).
The Others link will link to a directory with the original (unprocessed) images for that day. These directories often have images of other celestial objects or special shots of the moon.
During the period from July 16th to July 31st, 2005, the Southern Bay Area was blessed with a string a extremely clear nights which allowed to take 15 consecutive images of the moon. The instrument used was an Orion Apex 102mm Maksutov-Cassegrain Telescope, mounted on an AZ-3 (alt-az) mount with a Celestron 32 mm Plossl eyepiece and a Konica Minolta DImage Z2 camera. All images before the night between the 23rd and 24th were taken by manually holding the camera to the eyepiece. Afterwards, I used an Orion SteadyPix adapter which allowed me to take longer exposures of earthshine and star clusters.
The moon rises approximately 45 minutes later every night, and at my house the moon (actually all objects near the ecliptic) must rise over a hill. When one considers that it takes between 15 minutes and a half hour to take a sufficient number of images to be assured a reasonably clear one, I finished imaging approximately 90 minutes after the actual moonrise time. As a result, near the end of the project I had to stay up until 3:30 AM to image the moon and I wasn't getting to bed until around 4:00 AM. I always tried to image the moon as late as practically possible so as to limit heatwaves and minimum the amount of atmosphere the moonlight had to travel through.
The images below are those that I subjectively judged as best for each given night. The DImage Z2 does not have a raw mode so they were acquired on the best JPEG setting. Almost all had a brownish orange tint so I adjusted levels in Photoshop and ran an Unsharp Mask to bring out more detail.
Images
July
16th to 17th [HiRes | LowRes | Others] |
July
17th to 18th [HiRes | LowRes | Others] |
July
18th to 19th [HiRes | LowRes | Others] |
July
19th to 20th [HiRes | LowRes | Others] |
July
20th to 21st [HiRes | LowRes | Others] |
July
21st to 22nd [HiRes | LowRes | Others] |
July
22nd to 23rd [HiRes | LowRes | Others] |
July
23rd to 24th [HiRes | LowRes | Others] |
July
24th to 25th [HiRes | LowRes | Others] |
July
25th to 26th [HiRes | LowRes | Others] |
July
26th to 27th [HiRes | LowRes | Others] |
July
27th to 28th [HiRes | LowRes | Others] |
July
28th to 29th [HiRes | LowRes | Others] |
July
29th to 30th [HiRes | LowRes | Others] |
July
30th to 31st [HiRes | LowRes | Others] |
Movie
of Whole 15 days [Gif | Large | Small] (Special Thanks to Greg Burns for the Movies) |
The Others link will link to a directory with the original (unprocessed) images for that day. These directories often have images of other celestial objects or special shots of the moon.