A Lunar Stretch

[Hankmeister3]

Most of my sky safaris center around capturing single-frames of DSOs. So most of the time I'm avoiding the Moon as much as possible. I've dabbled in planetary and Lunar imaging with very mixed results mainly because seeing conditions here in central Illinois rarely get above Pickering 6 or 7.

The evening of 9/5/19 was no exception with a very disappointing Pickering 3 to 4 sky which kept changing every half-hour. Unfortunately there's an asphalt two lane roadway about 120 feet away from our Penfield set-up area and by 10:00 it was still generating very detectable thermals. But I went ahead and mounted my SkyMax f/15 180mm Maksutov I also brought with me that evening. I used a 40-year old Japanese-manufactured Meade Orthoscopic eyepiece for eyepiece projection photography. I captured nearly one hundred frames that evening and out of those frames only about 8 were respectable and this frame was probably the best of those. I photographed along the terminator and tweaked my focus after every 15 to 20 exposures since the roiling atmosphere was making it pretty difficult to dial the focus in using the 10x focusing feature on my Canon EOS 80D LCD screen.

This single-frame exposure was 1/6 second at ISO 640 though I would have liked to have been around 1/30 at ISO 200. Unfortunately my projection image scale was a bit too high that evening and I didn't want to spend the time to "retool" the optical train. A 2700mm focal length compounded by a 12.5mm eyepiece with about 50mm of projection makes for some serious magnification and thus a much dimmer image.

[Don Quixote]

Nice one Henry.
Rupes Altai and Theophilus came out well.
Bravo.

I could be mistaken about Theo.

[Don Quixote]

Hi Henry.
I was mistaken on Theophilus crater.
I mistook Piccolomini for Theo. The other big craters the best I can figure are Zagut, Gemma Frisius, and Maurolycus.

[Dragonsfire]

Nice capture their. Theirs lots of neat stuff on the moon

[Makuser]

Hello Henry. A superb lunar image from you. I looks like a lunar fly by. And Mark is correct in that the crater on the center left is Crater Piccolomini, and the crater at the top right in the shadow is Crater Zagut. Thanks for sharing this excellent work with us on here Henry, and the best of regards.

[Hankmeister3]

Thanks, Mark. I'm not an expert on lunar topography and crater identification so any help is appreciated.

So you can go back to being a "tin man" now, dear bro'. Heh! I think you catch my drift.

Looking forward to more sky safaris with you when nature decides to better behave itself!

[Bigzmey]

Nice capture Henry!

[Juno16]

Pretty cool close up Henry! It looks like you are in orbit!

[bladekeeper]

Very nice on a singular frame, Henry.

[Hankmeister3]

Thanks Bigz and Jim, you guys are being far too kind. It's my best single-frame lunar image to date and I hope that this spring and summer I can get some nice Pickering 8 skies at some point to better this image.