The other day I was out at the observatory doing some work on my scope and I stood up under the scope smacking my head pretty hard on the OTA. I didn't quite see stars but it hurt! After the pain subsided, I realized that I had moved the scope against the mount clutches a bit. After dark I tried to find an object and sure enough, everything had moved. The bad news was that Pinpoint just would not plate solve any field with the scope that lost. So, I gave up and went looking for the moon. That's a great trick for re-orienting a completely lost remote telescope. After manually chasing the stray light and eventually centering the moon, I fired off a couple of quick shots just to see what I'd get. Understand that the telescope had not yet been focused so this was a bit of crap shoot. I also goofed and used a camera setting that was set for 2x2 binning. This is what I got using the Ha filter at about a 1 second exposure.

Yes...I know that it's nothing compared to what "real" lunar lucky-imaging can produce; but, I liked it for a coupe of reasons. First, it shows the field of my camera in the sky. On this night, the moon was 1980.5 arc seconds in diameter (that's 33.01 arc-minutes.) The field of my sensor computes at 32.49 arc-minutes at an efl=3900 mm...so it's close. Second, I was impressed at how well the focus held from the previous session. It wasn't perfect, but it was reasonably close.

I'm not a lunar imager but it was fun to produce this result and I completely see the attraction of lunar (and planetary) imaging. Maybe I'll have to give it a more serious try one of these days with a more appropriate camera, shorter exposures and the right software. RBI really screws up the 16803 sensor for a while after imaging the moon so I'm not anxious to do more with my deep sky equipment when I could be collecting photons from a more distant faint object. As always, C&C is welcome.

John