The main reasons that I have so few blog posts recently have been the projects, of which there are several – some of which you may see here, but most probably not, because they’re house-related schtuff. And I should be working on some of them right now, except I’m not, because I’m dicking around.
The moon is bright out there right now, and I went out briefly to shoot a few frames, because it’s been a while. It’s in waxing gibbous phase and appears to be directly overhead; it’s not, rather at about 75°, but that’s enough to be craned over uncomfortably backward having difficulty with the long lens raised high above my head. It was adequate to snag one clear frame, however.
That’s not as sharp as I’ve managed a few times before, but it was also handheld since I didn’t feel like getting the tripod for such a short session, plus the gymnastics required to be shooting, again, close to straight up – tripods aren’t made to view those kinds of angles easily. There’s a detail therein that’s not very visible here, but shows up at full resolution and beyond.
This is not quite twice the resolution of the original image, and shows a single point of light (okay, reflection) right there at the ‘north pole’ of the moon. I was curious as to what I was seeing up there, and so I started poking around, with the help of Topographical Maps of the Moon and the Google Earth Pro program – not the online resource, though I didn’t check to see if this could be found that way, but the program has options to view the moon and Mars and such. The problems with both of these are, they don’t appear like they do in the photos you might obtain, because the first resource is a colorful illustration with more detail than you’re likely to capture, and the latter only uses photos from ‘high noon,’ as it were, which destroys the modeling and shadows of craters and geography that are visible in photos taken at any other time of lunar day.
Then there’s libration, the wobble that the moon undergoes as it revolves around the earth, so at any given moment it might be tilted from the equatorial view that maps and illustrations always provide. This means that what appears to be near the north pole of the moon may not be – it’s just the tilt of the moon. And it was in this case, placing that prominent crater in the center of the second image, which is Plato, higher up on the lunar globe than it is normally illustrated, since the pole is leaning back away from us right now. Still, after a bit of playing, I think I have things plotted reasonably well. The ridge at far left is Montes Jura, forming the edge of the old crater Sinus Iridium. The little squiggle straight up from Plato, near the edge of the darkness, is the southern wall of Goldschmidt Crater, pretty distinctively shaped, so the little point catching the light over the horizon of the moon is likely the southeastern wall of Anaxagoras Crater. This sits about 72.5° north, so still a ways from the north lunar pole (90° of course,) but again, the moon is tilted right now, so closer to ‘visible north’ than that.
Exciting, right? Yeah, but I like the challenge, a little bit of sleuthing and resource comparisons, which I could also do indoors because it’s cold. Still, you’re probably anxiously awaiting the tag roundup, so I’ll get back to that.