PAO's
Lunar Astroimaging
 |
The Moon at First Quarter
This image was taken by eyepiece projection using a 26mm eyepiece on
the LX200. The camera was a consumer digital camera, a Nikon 4300.
Click for a full size version. (image reversed)
I took all of the following images on this page at the prime focus of my 90mm Meade ETX Maksutov-Cassagrain telescope (f/13) using a Texas Instruments TC-255 CCD imaging chip. I removed the chip from a B&W Quickcam digital camera and housed it in a peanut butter jar lid (perfect size and shape) to mount on the scope. A Pentium 100 laptop recorded the photos.
An area of the Southern Highlands region.
The large crater (with four craters inside it) just right of center
is Clavius. Clavius is roughly 150 miles in diameter.
Rays emerge from craters Kepler and Copernicus.
Centered in the above image is the huge flat-floored crater Plato. The
dark flat area to its North is Mare Frigoris and the one to the South of
the crater is Mare Imbrium. A thin dark line to the left of Plato
cuts through the rough highlands from Northwest to Southeast and is called
the Alpine Valley. Like the two regions it connects, it contains
mare material.
Tycho (top center), with its 2.25 kilometer high central peak, is 85
kilometers wide and relatively young at only 109 million years old.
Tycho with impact rays.
The Apennine Mountains.
The large crater centered above the mountain range is Archimedes and
the slightly smaller one at the lower right end of the range is Eratosthenes.
