The Full Moon of May 25, 2013. Click to enselenate.
Photo by Fred Locklear, used by permission
Photo by Fred Locklear, used by permission
Amateur astronomers—and I count myself among them; those of us who go
out under the night sky and observe it just for the love and joy of
it—often discount the Moon. Perhaps worse, and more unfairly, we
actively dislike it: Its bright orb glows fiercely, washing out the
fainter objects that are already difficult to see.
But the Moon is itself a target of interest and beauty. Every phase
reveals new details on its surface, with hills, mountains, crater rims,
and sinuous valleys casting shadows and revealing relief.
When the Moon is full, though, the Sun is shining straight down on it
from our viewpoint. Shadows disappear, our perception of elevation is
erased, and the flat disk looks eerie and more like the alien world it
is.
"Amateur" astronomer Fred Locklear, aka zAmb0ni, used his 20 cm (8”) Celestron telescope to create the mosaic of the full Moon of May 25, 2013 at the top of this article, and it’s simply stunning. Mind you, I had to shrink it a lot to get it to fit here. A lot. The original image is 6000 x 6000 pixels,
and scanning over it will feel like flying over the Moon’s surface. He
created this picture using frames from video he shot through the
telescope, taking the best ones to create the mosaic, and then doing
some standard processing to clean and sharpen them.
One cool thing about the full Moon is that the angle of sunlight
highlights features like ray patterns: collapsed plumes of dust and rock
ejected from ancient impacts. This debris lies on Moon’s surface,
forming long delicate fingers stretching away from craters. Over vast
periods of time, sunlight and micrometeorite impacts darkens the dust,
turning it gray like the rest of the surface, so young craters look
fresher, brighter, as do their rays. They're easy to spot all over the
surface, but the king of them all is Tycho, at the Moon’s southern
latitudes:
Tycho, a 90-km-wide 100-million-year-old crater on the Moon.
Photo by Fred Locklear, used by permission
Photo by Fred Locklear, used by permission
Even this shot was scaled down to fit here; again you should look at
the full-size picture to grasp this. Tycho (the location of the Monolith
excavation in the movie “2001”) is such an amazing crater that it’s one
of my favorites to observe whenever it’s illuminated, but especially at
full Moon. It’s truly a wonderful sight to see.
It’s easy to take for granted things we see all the time, especially
the ones that might otherwise interfere with our plans. But sometimes
it’s the obstacle itself that should be the goal.
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posted by Pieface @ 3:13 PM
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