Lunar Observation Session on May 27

Before the mansoon starts we planned observation session on May 26, 2007. We planned to go away from Mumbai to Murbad area for observation. But at Last moment plan failed as we realize that moon will be in sky till 2:45 am leaving us very short period of time for DSO, and that to in cloudy sky. So alternately we planned Moon Observation from comfort of our Home. And here are some of the observations made on May 27, 2007 (:D – Not on 26).

I have decided to do some sketching of Moon, aiming at some domes & rills. Using 4” telescope I targeted Moon at around 11:00 pm, but unfortunatly my all eyepiece combinations provided with only 160X L. And “Jale Pe Namak” sky condition was so good that I could have cranked to 300X easily with 4” !!!!

Well due to lack of Magnification I could not observe Domes as Planned and at somewhat low magnification Sketching is too difficult so I changed my plans from sketching to Photographing :)

Using 4X Barlow coupled with 25mm Eyepiece I used my Mobile Camera, I took some snaps by painstakingly centering tiny Mobile Camera lens over small eyepiece eye lens. There is lot of shaky images :(. So I decided to video shoot using mobile, I know that it will give me small image size but still it is the best thing I can do to get better results as I can choose good frames from 1000s of available. Here to my surprise I do get some acceptable results, If Camera would have mounted on Eyepiece instead of Hand held it would be much better that what I got…

Here are what I got...
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1. Copernicus View One 2 unprocessed Frames .


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2. Copernicus View Two – 4 unprocessed Frames .


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3. Gassendi - 2 unprocessed Frames .


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4. J. Herschel – I have seen this amazing crater for the first Time, It surprising that I have never come across this big crater before. May be the conditions on May 27 were favorable at crater was rightly placed at terminator. The details visible in telescope were really beautiful as you can guess from this low resolution photo.


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5. Tyco region - The bright white one is Tyco – Don’t think I have copied it from somewhere by Looking at “DIVx” watermark :D I have to convert file from 3gp format (This is the format Mobile camera captures video) to AVI so that I can extract frames using Microsoft Movie Maker.


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6. North of Tyco region


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I will try to find out Names of all prominent craters and other features and will update in my Celestial Log.

I know these photos are not of great quality and even web camera attached to telescope can produce much much better results but these are captured using very crude method and no setup at all just telescope set for visual observation and a Mobile with camera :).

I am posting these photos to make other amatures think of Astrophotography is, also as simple as using ordinary camera; and not always a very specialize stream of Photography which requires costly equipments and great skills!!! Those who have basic digital cameras can produce much better results than this.

Have a Nice Day

Sameer