Copernicus and shrapnel around the mountains (Feb. 23, 2021)

Here's another moon shot.  Copernicus is one of what I consider "big splat" craters on the moon (Tycho, Aristarchus, and Kepler are others).  Copernicus is about 800 million years old---young by lunar standards.  That's why it is lighter than the surrounding area.  Anyway, the splat threw up lots of material, so the area around Copernicus is covered with little craters and stuff that I've always figured resulted from the splat.  But a ridge of mountains rings this whole area, and those were there before the splat.

Some of my other favorite craters are in this area, too, like Lansberg, Reinhold, and Hortensius E (very cool), but I'll let you find those.  Also find T. Mayer C, which has a great internal structure.  A good resource for scouting around the moon is the map made from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.  Find the "Quickmap" at the LRO website here.  Click on the guide at upper left, click Overlays, and click "Nomenclature" on the first set of layers.  That imposes map labels on the craters.

This image is a stack of 2002/2002 images taken with the QHY5iii485c camera through the CFF 290 Classical Cassegrain at f/13.5, native focal length.  I just did the basic AutoStakkert, Registax, Photoshop routine and also used Canon Digital Prof'l 4. I can see details smaller than 1km on this image.

Schiller Area (Feb. 2021)

Conditions were very good on the night of Feb. 23 to take some images of the waxing moon.  I am a very casual lunar imager; my strategy is to set up, cool the scope off, and take a picture of anything interesting close to the terminator.  Also, solar system imaging is no specialty of mine; I'm pretty new at it.  But I enjoy observing the sky, and it's nice to do some visual observing, too, after imaging.

Schiller is an odd crater because whatever smacked the moon did it at an angle.  The crater is stretched out, and the floor peaks are all at one end.  Apparently Schiller is 112 miles long and 13,000 deep from bottom of the floor to the top of the peaks (but no ruler was used in this measurement).

This image is a stack of 2002/2002 images taken with the QHY5iii485c camera through the CFF 290 Classical Cassegrain at f/13.5, native focal length.  I just did the basic AutoStakkert, Registax, Photoshop routine.  I also used Canon Digital Prof'l 4.

M16 (Jan. 2021)

When Martin Pugh offered a sample data set of M16 over Facebook earlier this year at no cost, I happily downloaded.  This is HaRGB, just 3x900" for each of RGB and 6x1200" for Ha. Telescope: CDK16. 

NGC 1566 (2019)

 This wonderful galaxy appears in the constellation Dorado and is about 69 million light years away.  It is one of many face-on spirals that are a great sight in any telescope or for any camera.

Orion Rising, a test of the QHY5iii485 (Jan. 31, 2021)

 

Took the new camera for a spin.  You may want to watch the video in full-screen mode.  For this image, I used the allsky lens that came with the camera.  It's actually pretty sharp.  I can see M45, the Hyades, and the Orion Nebula. When focusing at 150x, I saw all the brighter Pleiades, and star colors were obvious.