Contains:  Solar system body or event
Moon and Stars, Gary JONES

Moon and Stars

Moon and Stars, Gary JONES

Moon and Stars

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Description

I was very fortunate this week to have a few evenings of extremely clear skies, so I wanted to take advantage of the good conditions.

Seeing was great at about 1.5", with mild temperatures and virtually no cloud or wind. Unfortunately (or fortunately), the Moon was very bright and close to my intended target (the Helix Nebula), so I decided to capture some images of the Moon while I waited for the Helix to be in a better position.

The clarity of the craters along the terminator and other lunar features yielded a very nice image, however the Moon lacked context because the 10ms exposure was too short to capture any of the background stars. Then I realised that, if the Helix was not the best target for this session, the surrounding star field would provide a nice context for the image of the Moon.

So - this image is a composite of a single 10ms image of the Moon, together with the star field surrounding the Helix Nebula created from a stack of 24 x 300 second subs.

Although this image is a composite, the elements were all captured on the same evening and in the same part of the sky - just two hours and twenty minutes apart.

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