19 Day Old Moon

19 Day Old Moon - 12/31/2004

Dec 31, 2004 12:47-13:45 UTC - I went to bed to a cloudy sky, but set my alarm anyway. When I woke up at 3:30am I looked out to a crystal clear sky. I hadn't set my scope up in advance, so I rushed around to get ready. Due to my being unprepared, the shoot was rather tough and took a long time. I also neglected to use my dew shield and paid for it at the end of the shoot when the main objective started fogging up. In the end, I captured an image that is a good replacement for an image I've been unhappy with for a long time due to an unsatisfactory terminus: old 19 day moon.

Features: The Sun is beginning to set on the trio of Theophilus, Cyrillus, and Catharina revealing good detail. Tycho is starting to look three dimensional as well as the mountains around Mare Imbrium

Conditions: Seeing was moderate to good, but dew started to build up towards the end of the shoot. The Moon was 52 degrees above the horizon.

The image was created by stitching together 40 images using Paintshop Pro 8.1. Each image was created by capturing AVIs with a Philips Vesta 690k and using K3CCDTools. I preprocessed each image using Registax 3, stacking about 100 frames. The telescope used was a Meade LX-90 (8" SCT, f/10).

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