Hi all,
Every age and culture has it’s legends and stories about the moon - ranging from the mythological through to kid’s tales. But when I took up the hobby of astronomy a few weeks ago I never expected to discover a family link to the moon (albeit not a very close connection!
).
A few weeks ago I came across a post with a link to an interesting story on the LPOD site, from 2007, about maps that the astronauts made during training for the Apollo 11 landing. I thought I’d found the link somewhere on these forums, but repeated searches have failed to turn it up again, so perhaps not… Anyway it’s worth a look.
http://lpod.wikispaces.com/September+10%2C+2007
I also found a link to relevant maps of the moon, and was able to match the location of the astronaut’s map to the larger versions with various ‘official’ names on - such as the crater Maskelyne.
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov//vis/a0000...2013_clear.jpg
and
http://www.astronomy.org/StarWatch/J...11-landing.jpg
Nothing remarkable about that of course. But what did amaze me was that I was able to also locate the same area on a basic photo taken a few nights ago in my garden, using an amateur telescope that cost me only a few hundred dollars (A Sky Watcher Maksutov 127x1500) and an old, and relatively basic Canon 600D camera.
I had absolutely no idea that I would be able to get anything other than a fairly vague and cheesy moon shot with little in the way of detail. So I was both surprised and pleased to get some useful shots. Apart from a small amount of sharpening the shots below are from one single shot. No stacking, Photoshopping or fancy processing.
Initially I thought that the landing site was in the dark on my photo and that by the time the moon was fuller I would lose the detail you get from the shadows. But when I tried comparing my picture with ones from NASA and various maps I realised that my shot was the “wrong way around”. Right for the Southern hemisphere but wrong for the North where most of the maps and pics came from. It simply hadn’t registered with me before that the moon looks the other way up when you change hemispheres! Well, doh… but I’d never had a reason to think about it before…. that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.
The reason I was interested in the astronauts’ maps was that they had named various locations after places, friends and relatives on earth. For instance Mt Marilyn was after Jim Lovell’s wife and Wash Basin (apart from being a clever pun) was named in honour of Mike Wash who was apparently a key man in the team who trained the atronauts for their missions. And, thanks to a visit a couple of months ago from a relative who lives in the UK, I had recently found out that Mike Wash is my second cousin. His Grandmother (who I remember visiting when I was a kid) and my Grandfather were brother and sister (i.e my father and his mother were first cousins). My UK based cousin and his family had met up with Mike when they visted the USA. So it was rather cool to find that out! (They're generally a very honest bunch, so I've no reason to doubt the story. But it makes a good tale anyway.)
So I now have a photo, taken in my own garden, of a section of the moon allegedly informally named by Apollo astronauts after my second cousin! I never expected that when I took up the hobby of astronomy back in April.! !
Cheers,
Chris
Photos:
1. The original pic
2. After rotating and cropping
3. Zoomed in a bit more and info added from the astronaut's map.
I haven't yet explored the whole stacking thing, but it's on the list to check it out at some stage. 
