A couple of close up of the Moon, around the craters Copernicus and Plato.
Moon, Copernicus Crater area
Nearby is also visible the crater Eratosthenes.
Shot with my SkyMax 180, ASI 178MM
Moon, Plato crater area
Above it, slightly to the left, there's Cassini, a medium sized crater with two smaller craters inside (Cassini A and B).
Separating the two, the Montes Alpes, with the Vallis Alpes within, then Mont Blanc.
To the far left, another two big craters, Aristotelest (the biggest) and Eudoxus.
To the top/right, the vast plain of Mare Imbrium.
This was meant to be an improvement to the previous ISS shooting, since I tried to do it with a bigger telescope, but the low altitude and the very bad seeing did actually worsen the quality.
The shape of the Space Station is anyway clearly visible, as it passes in front of the Moon. It is dark, this time, because it already entered in Earth shadow. We could actually see it rising, bright as usual, and then slowly fade until it completely disappeared just a few seconds before crossing the Moon.
Technical details of the shot can be found on the pagina Youtube.
ISS transit over the Moon - April 2016
This was meant to be an improvement to the previous ISS shooting, since I tried to do it with a bigger telescope, but the low altitude and the very bad seeing did actually worsen the quality.
Last august I had the chance to see the International Space Station passing in front of the moon right from my home.
The ISS is clearly visible many nights, and depending on the user position on Earth, it might align with some object in the sky.
These days I was reorganizing my gallery, and I found the original video.
So, after reprocessing it a while, I decided to republish it.
The ISS is really fast: the video is slightly slowed down. I remember that during the transit I couldn’t see the station, and I waited a few minutes because I couldn’t know if the transit already happened or not: it was still daylight, and in the original frames is barely visible.
Only after watching the video I could finally notice that tiny dot passing right in front of the moon.
ISS transits over the Moon
Video on youtube: [url=https://youtu.be/Fcwv85l20Xo]https://youtu.be/Fcwv85l20Xo[/url]
I shot this with my 130mm F/5 telescope, to be sure to have a field wide enough to not miss the space station.
It was still daylight, with the moon very low in altitude.
Also, I had to track the moon manually, since this telescope has a dobsonian mount.
For this shot, I used my old Celestron Astromaster 130, in an alt-azimuth mount, and my QHY5L-IIm as shooting camera. I had to try following manually the moon, since I obviously had no motorized tracking.
I had to use the 130mm scope instead of my main 8″ scope because of the shorter focal length: this way I could shoot almost the whole moon, so I could be sure that I didn’t miss the ISS.
Spring is back, and here in Milan we finally had a few days (and nights) of very nice weather.
I also bought a new lightweight battery for my HEQ5 mount, instead of the usual heavy car battery I’ve been using until now, so I took a minimal setup and placed myself in a local park.
Seeing wasn’t perfect, but it was fine enough to shoot a few nice details of an almost full moon.
Gassendi, Mare Humorum
Crater Gassendi
More importantly, Jupiter was at opposition a few weeks ago, so it’s still in a very favourable position.
Jupiter with satellites
Jupiter
All these shots were done using my own Planetary Imager.
Image processing was done using Autostakkert (stacking), Registax (wavelets), and GIMP (post processing).
A shot at the moon taken in a last quarter evening.
It’s a mosaic of 78 pictures, each of them stacked from 300 frames of 500. Images were taken at primary focus of my Meade ACF 8″ (2000 mm focal length), using a QHY5II-L mono.
Moon (mosaic), September 2014
For each image I stacked 300 frames (out of 500).
Very poor seeing (lots of turbulence, since I shot it through an open window).
Seeing was a bit too bad (I have to shoot from my window, since I don’t have a garden, which can make turbulence even worse).
Even if it’s not a perfect result I’m pretty satisfied: given the conditions lots of details are visible, and it also look quite good.
I hope to be able to shoot something even better soon!