50th Anniversary of Apollo 11

On July 16 1969 Apollo 11 lifted off with Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins on board. A few days later on July 20th Armstrong and Aldrin became the first two humans to walk on the moon, this month marks the 50th anniversary of the historic mission.

Three craters near the landing site have been named for the three astronauts, each on 3-5km in diameter. These craters are not simple to image and have been a target of mine for some time. I’ve hoped for a while that image stacking would allow the small craters to become apparent and tonight I was finally successful!

The craters are barely visible, and are still difficult to see, but they’re there!

I have been having success using my smartphone camera with a video. I used settings of 200 ISO and 1/150 seconds and took a video of about a minute. The frames were aligned in PIPP, stacked in Autostakkert, and sharpened with wavelet filters in Registax.

Happy 50th anniversary of the first lunar landing! 50 years from now I hope to be telling my grandchildren about my own moon landing (and possibly Mars landing!).

And thanks to my wife for my novelty beer!