Moon, 9 and 10 August
Posted: Sun Aug 11, 2019 10:23 pm
Man, it has been raining and raining and raining. Finally, on Friday, the rain stopped. The clouds were still hanging around though.
Despite the clouds, the forecast was calling from some clearing. I had my doubts but I set up for lunar imaging anyway. That can be a get in, get it done, get out sort of affair. As poor as the sky was, that is what I was counting on.
That’s not what I got. I managed to get my full disk capture done easily enough as well as the top panel for my three-panel mosaic. After that, the clouds swarmed in and stayed with me. Of particular frustration was one long and narrow swath of cloud that angled right toward the Moon and traveled its whole length across the lunar disk. Why does that happen?
I waited that out. I managed to get the other two mosaic panels captured during cloud gaps. On the last image, I threw in the 3× focal extender hoping for a decent closer-in view of Copernicus. The clouds really didn’t want that to finish. A gap would open, grab some frames, gab would begin closing, pause the capture, so on and so forth.
What should have been 10 minutes of work took about 45 minutes.
Here is Friday night’s full disk:
And the mosaic (be sure to click the Flickr image again to blow it up for detail):
And the closer Copernicus capture:
Saturday night was much clearer, though it was swamp-butt humid and hot. Transparency was trash and some popcorn clouds turned up here and there. Not a good night to be out with a scope.
I managed a full disk capture and another mosaic.
And that’s about it. Too trashy for visual observing (what else is new?) and too unreliable for long-exposure imaging.
Despite the clouds, the forecast was calling from some clearing. I had my doubts but I set up for lunar imaging anyway. That can be a get in, get it done, get out sort of affair. As poor as the sky was, that is what I was counting on.
That’s not what I got. I managed to get my full disk capture done easily enough as well as the top panel for my three-panel mosaic. After that, the clouds swarmed in and stayed with me. Of particular frustration was one long and narrow swath of cloud that angled right toward the Moon and traveled its whole length across the lunar disk. Why does that happen?
I waited that out. I managed to get the other two mosaic panels captured during cloud gaps. On the last image, I threw in the 3× focal extender hoping for a decent closer-in view of Copernicus. The clouds really didn’t want that to finish. A gap would open, grab some frames, gab would begin closing, pause the capture, so on and so forth.
What should have been 10 minutes of work took about 45 minutes.
Here is Friday night’s full disk:
And the closer Copernicus capture:
I managed a full disk capture and another mosaic.
And that’s about it. Too trashy for visual observing (what else is new?) and too unreliable for long-exposure imaging.
