[bkm2304 (Richard Brown)]

Hi all,
Still processing shots from a very remarkable couple of days' seeing last October. Here's Albategnius.

Albategnius is a Latinised name for the Arab astronomer, al-Battani (858ish - 929). He was an excellent positional astronomer and his tables of planetary and lunar motion were used by Copernicus, Tycho, Kepler, Gallileo and Halley, such was their unsurpassed accuracy. Alas, he was a geocentrist and did not see what his data told him.

Klein, named for the German astronomer Herman Klein (1844-1914). The crater was previously Albategnius A but changed to Klein in 1935. Klein was an avid moon watcher and reported a new crater - Hyginus n (for nova) which he argued was due to volcanic activity.

The broad-plained Ptolemaeus sits at lower right and named for Ptolemy the Greco-Egyptian-Roman astronomer who set the geocentric model firmly in place for 1500 years.

Given al-Battani's observational expertise, it is perhaps no coincidence that Ptolemaeus is close by - whose Älmagest al-Battani revised. Halley used his observations and Hipparchus developed trigonometry which al-Battani also did.

Another excellent observationist close by is Sherburne Burnham (1838-1921), the American semi-professional astronomer who catalogued over 13,665 pairs of double stars.

Over to the left of the image is Airy as in George (1801-1892), Astronomer Royal for what seemed to some unkind colleagues as a very, very long time - 46 years!

Beyond George is Faye and Donati, two comet discoverers from the 19th century. Donati's comet of 1858 still has a high place in spectacular apparitions and deserves the acclamation, "Great".

ZWO 178mm camera, Celestron 9.25" telescope. Approx. 2,000 frames stacked in Autostakkert!3 and sharpened in Registax.