We’ve got clear skies, so why not use them? So here’s tonight’s Moon.

Half a Moon from this evening.

I was lucky to catch this slice of Moon yesterday!

After watching the skies for planes, let’s do some amateur astrophotography – the Moon 2015 album has all the Moon shots from last year, which turned out to be a lot. We often had clear skies and the Powershot SX1 proved to be quite good even though the combination of a 20x zoom and 10 megapixels still only allows a full moon size of about 550-600 pixels in diameter. But it’s a distinct improvement over the S5 and with some careful stacking of several images using Registax it’s possible to get a surprising amount of detail. Click on the preview photo above or the link below to go to the gallery, but you can also find a G+ version over on my Google+ Profile or the Astrophotography Gallery Collection – but the gallery on my own webspace has the advantage of having uncompressed PNG images.

« MOON 2015 »

Here’s another Moon attempt from two days ago before the horrible weather came!

No Moon shots due to clouds today or on the 20th, but yesterday I had a chance before the nasty weather came – so here’s an almost full Moon from last evening!

Another “Blue Moon”, this time from January 19.

I was a bit on a roll before the cloudy weather hit – so here’s another
Moon from January 18, with a blue sky in the background for a change!

More Moon and more craters from January 17. For those that tune in here for the first time: my Moon photos are not taken through a telescope, only with a modest Canon Powershot SX1 at 20x zoom (560mm in 35mm terms). At 10mp resolution, this allows an image size of only about 600×600 pixels, but I still love to try it once in a while because it’s amazing how much detail you can pick up with such a relatively “little” camera. Each photo is made up of about 15-20 stacked frames combined with Registax to get rid of the camera noise and bring out more detail. Final tweaking was done in Paint Shop Pro X with a bit of contrast and brightness balancing and a highpass filter in addition to Registax’ Wavelet sharpening. I wish I had a camera with an even more powerful zoom so I could get even closer, though!

This is not the first Moon of 2016 – that was on January 1 right in the first hours of the year, but this photo from two days ago is the first time we’ve had a look at the Moon since then.