Langrenus and Petavius in the Sea of Fertility (BillyBoyBoy)

Langrenus and Petavius in the Sea of Fertility

A night to shoot some Ha data becomes a bust when, after a few hours of troubleshooting, I conclude that my DSO camera is on the blink. I'm like, hey, I'm out here with my scope... let's pull out the ol' planetary train and shoot the Moon!

After trolling the Moon's surface for a while just to enjoy looking at the thing, this shot attracted me with the log shadows the two craters' central peaks made with the oblique sunlight. I had a 17 day old Moon (86.3% illuminated). It gives one a sense of the shape of the geography, and besides, it looks neat.

That central peak in Petavius is about 1.7 km high from the crater floor, and that long feature extending across the crater's radius is a long trench called a rille, created by lava flow in the distant past. This is beautiful geology to me and it inspires me to get to know our own satellite a bit more.

So I process the image before I identified or even learned anything about the crater, and now I have to name the thing so I try to look up some sort of Moon map with crater names online, but that's easier said than done. After enough of that, I realize my Moon globe is right above me on my processing desk, so I pull it down and voila! Now, finding the craters and exploring what I imaged in the picture sparks a new interest in moon photography for me. What happened as a punt turned into something I'll enjoy doing again as an intended pursuit. What's more, from here on out, I'll learn more about anything I image beforehand, to be more aware of what I'm shooting, and especially to be knowledgeable of the features while I'm processing them to be even more appreciative of the subject.

Big credit to my Bisque MyT mount to track with custom track rate on the Moon and freeze the shot on my sensor for this 10 minutes of 10000 frames.

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Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
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Backyard
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Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
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Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
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Unknown

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