I was on my way to bed yesterday morning (hush) and decided to peek outside for a moment. The moon was bright and clear and looked pretty close to my target phase: catching sunrise or sunset on the central peak within Tycho crater, which I admit I still don’t understand because I’ve already done it a few times now, but it’s an obsession I guess. I really wasn’t inclined to tackle a proper session, with the tripod and remote release and mirror lockup, but I thought, Just attach the long lens and wing it handheld – it’ll only take a minute. Of course, I was using the wheedling, singsong little internal voice I can never resist, so…
The moon was at the wrong altitude for stability, making me hold the camera at an angle that I wasn’t used to and couldn’t stay very steady in, and even manual focusing was a chore, but I fired off several frames, both to give the stabilizer in the lens a chance to work its magic, and to adjust focus every few frames to try and nail one – the moon is too small in the frame for really exact focusing, especially when the camera isn’t steady, and the focus screen has a resolution limit anyway, so refocusing frequently improves your chances (or mine at least) of a decent frame. And it worked – just once.
This is the entire frame, so you know what I was working with, and in a more-or-less level view to boot. Now we go in to full resolution, rotated to use the layout better.
Juuusst a little degraded from using ISO 800. but not that bad – cameras really have improved in the higher ISOs from what they used to do. The large crater on the shadow terminator down towards the bottom, the one with another little crater on its wall, isn’t Tycho, it’s Maginus; Tycho is just above it and slightly left, smaller but obviously deeper and clearly round. And you can just make out a tiny bright speck in the center of the shadow thrown by its own wall, but if that isn’t enough, that central peak throws its own shadow within the crater. I’d say I got the timing right. Meanwhile, more towards the top of the frame we have the line of Montes Appeninus, the lunar Appenines, emerging from the shadow pointing towards the crater Eratosthenes.
I’ve remarked how often the sunsets around get boring, with the atmosphere simply not providing anything for colors or textures, but it’s much worse on the moon, naturally; there might be a very faint hint of dimming and color shift from the sun before it disappears over the horizon, from a vestige of gases attracted by the weak gravity of the moon, but that would be it. No one’s had the chance to see it – all lunar expeditions took place in ‘midmorning’ of the lunar day (remember – a lunar day is 29 Earth days long) because the widely-varying temperature of the surface is best then. Moreover, the Earth remains in the same place in the lunar sky perpetually, given a little play from the lunar libration or wobble, but it can be seen to rotate. Those photos and video of ‘Earthrise’ over the moon were taken by the orbiting Apollo Command Modules.
In just a few minutes, a bank of clouds began rolling in, faster than they appeared, and my session was over.
But for giggles as I was typing this, I decided to see if the moon was again visible, even though Tycho would be in shadow and thus even photographing the moon at all was totally pointless. What I’ll do for the story, though. It was indeed up, clear enough though still showing a little color cast from being lower in the sky – but easier to handhold the camera for now. So, this is not quite 23 hours later:
Tycho, Maginus, Montes Appeninus, and Eratosthenes have all vanished into the night, with greater definition from some new craters – Copernicus is that prominent one just above the middle. I’d combine the two images into an animated gif to compare them directly, but again, it’s late in my personal day and I don’t feel like messing about. Take note of this, however: While we get these sharp definitions and distinct shadows from the lunar features at times like this, we can immediately refer to the edges of the moon to realize that none of these features are as high as we imagine them, only producing a faint wobbly variation from a perfect sphere when seen edge-on. It’s not like the craters peter out towards the ‘edges’ – if anything, they get much denser, as the far side saw, and sees, a lot more bombardment than this side. Had the moon rotated in relation to Earth, we could watch these features roll into view over a period of several nights, comparing the ‘profile’ view with the contours that appear at different light angles, but nope – this is the face we see, period.