By Nina Gorenstein | 2022-09-09
On 09/09/2022 11:41 pm by Steve Price| Draper, UT USA
Three hours after the moonrise I set the telescope up again to capture some images when the moon was much higher in the sky to find less atmospheric turbulence and airborne particles wrecking the seeing. This image is a composite of 3 shots aligned and blended - stacked in Photopea.
The clear, sharp focus detailed deficiencies in the image are due to me - just holding a cell phone up to a telescope eyepiece...not professional astronomers with expensive toys. I think the cell phone camera is struggling with focusing its lens through all the glass in the telescope...plus me just holding it and manually firing the shutter. The actual telescope view is phenomenally crisp and detailed. I'll try an eyepiece phone mount and timer tonight.
With a little bit of contrast and color enhancement the mineral moon colors come out showing the blue tone areas, which contains iron, titanium and oxygen, mainly titanium, while the brownish colors show regions relatively poor in titanium and iron. The white/gray tones that we see with our eyes are reflections of sunlight.
In a nutshell...the moon isn't white with gray areas....it's colorful! due to the mineral deposits in varying in the form of compounds. Some of the compounds on the lunar surface are iron oxide, titanium dioxide, magnesium oxide, aluminum oxide, silicon dioxide, sodium oxide, calcium oxide, and so on.
Clear skies to everyone the Big Harvest Moon is giving us another show tonight!
Meade LX200 Telescope, Google Pixel 4 XL, handheld to the eyepiece.
This image is a composite of 3 shots aligned and blended - stacked in Photopea, with a little bit of contrast and color enhancement to bring out the mineral moon colors. The overall orange/pink cast is due to airborne fire soot and smoke.