Lunar Closeups

[peter_4059 (Peter)]

I recently decided to purchase a 5x Powermate after seeing some great lunar and planetary photos on this forum. As you woud expect it has been cloudy here since it arrived two weeks ago. Tonight looked promising so I gave it a try. Conditions were not great and as usual the clouds began appearing once I'd got everything set up so I rushed to get a few close ups of the moon. I didn't have time to get the focus just right and have gone a bit hard on the wavelets in Registax.

Not sure what craters I've captured here but they looked interesting on the laptop screen (I think the last one is Tycho)...any suggestions gratefully received...

[Stephen65]

Some nice shots there, the craters are left to right: Hippalus, Gassendi, Mersenius and Tycho

[peter_4059 (Peter)]

Thanks for the comments and for identifying these Stephen. Did you recognise them or look them up somehow?

I found it very difficult to work out where the telescope was pointing with such a small field of view through the powermate. Based on the published dimensions of Tycho it looks like the field of view on the moon is about 270x180 km with the powermate/neximage combination.

Peter

[Stephen65]

A mix Peter - the second to fourth I knew by sight because of distinctive features of the craters themselves, the first one I could ID pretty easily from Rukl's atlas because the concentric rilles running through the image indicate it's a crater on the edge of Mare Humorum. Knowing when you took the images helped of course.

I've certainly had the experience of occasionally getting "lost" on the Moon when using a 5x barlow for ultra-closeups. Usually I start with wide-field images of an area and then use increasingly powerful barlows to zoom in, that avoids getting lost.