here are two photos of the moon I took on Thursday, May 11, 2000. The clouds were moving in and I had about an hour of clear sky at 20:00. I set up my laptop computer with a 'Snappy' capture module and input to it with an Astrovid Planetary camera. It has 500 x 500 pixel resolution. The photos were taken at the camera's film plane with no eyepiece projection. These images were enhanced using Adobe Photoshop 5.0 to increase contrast and define edges a bit more. Better examples of these images can be found by clicking on my link to the Catskills Astronomy Club and scrolling down to Members Photos, where they are being posted by Peter Hewel who is a professional photo enhancer who reworked the full (4meg) files and did a better job than I could.
The craters in the top image are (from top to bottom): Ptolemaeus, Alphonsus and Arzechel, to the right are Albategnius and Klein. These were identified by Peter Hewel of the Catskill Astronomy Club here in New York State.
The moon photo below was taken Sunday, May 14th '00. It was a very windy night and it was very difficult to keep the telescope from shaking, thus the slightly unsharp appearance. The photo is of one of the only circular Mare's on the moon, Mare Humorum. To the top you see crater Gassendi and on the bottom, craters Doppelmeyer and Piuseux in descending order and crater Vitello to the right.
© 2002 by E. Bud Wertheim. All rights reserved. No materials may be reproduced without permission. All authorized copies must include this copyright line.