Our Nearest Neighbour

The Moon of course. This lunation has been very favourable in that the Moon has been high in the sky due to the steepness of the Ecliptic in April. As well as that I have been experimenting with a new camera, the Meade LPI (Lunar & Planetary Imager). This is really just a webcam but the clever part is the Meade Envisage software which uses RAM to perform the stacking and optimisation process in real time. Normally it is necessary to use vast amounts of disk space and perform time consuming post-processing to get the results that Envisage delivers immediately on the screen.

So firstly, here's the setup...



This was daytime, so here's the resulting daytime mosaic made up of four images stitched together...



Later that evening the Open Cluster M44 - the Beehive - emerged from behind the Moon follwing its occultation - here the Moon is necessarily overexposed to show M44 - the difference in brightness is about 12 magnitudes...



On the 14th the Moon was a little bigger. Note particularly the crater Clavius being very prominent near the South Pole. Here's a mosaic...



I had a go at some closeup work with a 3x Barlow lens on the front of the camera. Here's a closer view of Clavius...



Archimedes...



Eratosthenes with a bit of Copernicus to the left...



Tycho...



Ptolemaeus



And here's a South Pole mosaic from 13th...