When I got up in the early morning on 2/16/2022 (thanks to the dogs) I saw to the west another setting moon, but this time it was in full daylight, as you can see in the cell shot below. The barely waning gibbous moon is just to the right and a bit up from the birdie sitting on top of the tree. Being of unsound mind, how could I resist the challenge of trying to capture an image of the moon in the midst of such a sunlit sky!
So I opened the patio door, moved my 4 inch refractor into place, still in the kitchen, guessed at a polar alignment and acquired the moon in the main camera aiming through the open door. An exposure of 0.001s (the shortest I knew how to get to on the ASIAir simply gave a whiteout, so I plopped in an old Celestial polarized filter set (you rotate one filter against the other to diminish light throughput). That worked and I focused and shot 60 0.001s shots centered on the moon. As fate would have it, the moon had just started to touch the treetop (I was shooting from further left than in the pic above).
I received feedback from some members on the first posting of this image that made me reflect on a lot of things about Astrobin, things that I wrote about in the replies to comments that might bear on us all. Suffice it to say, I began to realize that the way I had originally composed the image was outside of the norms of Astrobin to the degree that I decided to replace the original with a new revision. To those of you who saw the original and liked it, I am happy you understood why I posted it that way. To those of you who felt it was not a good fit for Astrobin, I understand what your concerns were and am persuaded that you have a point. So, I have herewith posted a revision that is a processed version of exactly what was imaged when the moon was in the FOV. There is a fuzzy out of focus tree that the moon had just started to dip behind, which I left in rather than masking out because I wanted to stick to what was really captured without resorting to "photoshopping tricks." I still say that the moon looks decent for being imaged in daylight at a low altitude where the seeing is bad.
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