Shadows of Mountain Ranges on the Moon

I haven’t taken the telescope out in a while, and last night was a gorgeous night. Seeing was beautiful, it was nice and cool, and I was looking forward to enjoying the silence. The moon was beautiful and high in the sky, but I didn’t really have any other targets in mind. I spanned around the moon and simply tried photographing what was beautiful.

The first thing that jumped out to me was the mountain ranges near the terminator had stunningly long shadows. I took about 2000 frames and stacked the best 25%

Wavelet filtering in registax really pulled out the extra detail. To get the amazing levels of details I ended up processing much more than I normally would, but I still like the shot. It might look a bit cartoonish, but I love how much detail you can see.

Because the seeing was so good I figured I’d try the old standard of the Apollo11 landing site. With the shadows so drastic at that location I was hoping to see the astronaut craters. I am pretty sure last time I saw them I had mistaken different craters for the astronaut craters.

I had to really push the processing to insane levels but I was able to capture Aldrin, Collins, and Armstrong craters!

Before putting the telescope away I thought I would try to find the ring nebula again. It’s really on the line of what is possible with an untracked telescope. Thankfully I was able to star-hop to the location fairly easily and saw the (very) faint smudge of the nebula. I took 300 individual frames and stacked them. Even with the stacking you can barely make out the ring.

Next time I try to photograph it I will have to use my focal reducer so that I can bump up the exposure time. It worked for the Orion nebula, it should work for the ring nebula too!