My Moonshot

 If you have visited this blog over the last few years you would see that beside my biking adventures I also occasionally post some stories of some of my astronomical endeavors. Recently because of some good weather I have been working on getting some pictures of the moon. One of my goals in life is to get a picture of the moon for each day of its 28 day cycle. I have been taking pictures of the moon for at least the last 10 years. Until recently I took the pictures by attaching a camera to the eye piece of my telescope. It wasn't easy to get the camera aligned with the eye piece and although I got a few OK pictures they never look close to what I actually saw through the eye piece. 

Last year I bought a Canon SX740 super zoom camera. With a 40x zoom I can get a reasonable picture of the moon by just putting the camera on a tripod and pointing it at the moon. The results are a lot better than I have been able to get before. The picture at the top is a Day 13 moon just one day before full. 

It does take a little practice to get a good picture and you have to have good conditions. I usually take 30 or 40 pictures at a lot of different shutter speeds to the settings to get the best picture. This I do some post processing to adjust the exposure and sharpen it. This past two weeks have been clear with no wind so I was able to get out 5 different nights. Here are the pictures I got.

Here is the Day 4 Moon

Here is the Day 5 moon

Day 8 moon

Day 11 moon

The interesting thing about is that each day is different as the terminator (the line between light and dark part) moves and highlights different parts of the moon and different craters. I currently have 5 out of the 28 days and got a couple of other days from pictures Laura took. 

It will still take me a while to get the rest of the 28. Getting the first few days means I have to go some where that has a clear view of the western horizon because the first few days of the new moon are only visible in the early evening near the horizon. Getting day 3 thought 15 I is easy because I can get that from my backyard on a clear night before I go to bed. Getting day 16 to 28 is harder because by the time the moon got above the trees it would be after midnight so I would have stay up past my bedtime. 

I'm sure somehow I will eventually get all the pictures and if I do I plan to put together a video like this one. That will not only show the waxing and waning of the moon but the libration (The twisting of the moon as seen from the earth)

Of course getting the rest of the pictures will take some time as it is rare to have weather as clear and calm as we have had for the past couple of weeks. However now that I have a camera that can get a take a good picture of the moon I can opportunistically get the pictures as weather and my schedule allows.