Que the Apollo 13 music...

If you are as old as I am, you were around during the Apollo Moon Missions, which would be basically 1969 to about 1974 or so. I think. I can't remember exactly when the U.S gave up on going to the moon. A big mistake in my opinion. But that's not what this entry is about. The mission that was called the “successful failure” is, of course, Apollo 13. Intense to follow real time and a pretty good movie, staring Tom Hanks. That would be the music I'm referring to in my title. I think the original sound track is pretty good, too. I'm still off point, sorry. The point is that the landing area for Apollo was the crater Fra Mauro. It was not until Wednesday night, the 13^th, that I was able to image it, or anything for quite some time. The past several months have been the cloudiest I can seen for a long time.

I didn't know Fra Mauro's location on the moon until a few days before the 13^th. Earlier the spring, while it was cloudy, I decided I wanted images of the Astronomical League's Lunar List, which can be found on their web site. (You don't need a telescope for all the items, so you could download the list and see how many you could see.) I looked over the images of the moon I already have and found I already have about 60% of the list. One that I didn't, up until now, was Fra Mauro. And, to me, that's a rather important one. So, I basically got lucky on the evening of the 13^th because Fra Mauro was near the terminator, which is an ideal placement for imaging and it was CLEAR. Well, clear enough. So, without further ado (or finally...what's taking so long as some would say).....

So, which crater IS Fra Mauro? Well, it's this one. With the white dot that is

Now that you know which one it is, this is the same image without the identification.

Thanks to Virtual Moon Atlas, this is where Fra Mauro is in relation to the whole moon.

My image is the best 95% of 1100 images taken on the 13^th. Remember that I do lunar and planetary imaging with a webcam, so that represents only 34 seconds of time to take the 1100 images. In fact, I was able to open the observatory, turn everything on, get everything aligned, take the images, visually observe Alberio (probably my favorite double star) and epsilon Lyre (the famous “double double”. Naked eye, it appears as one star; in binoculars or telescope at low power, it appears as a double star; on high power, the each star of the double star resolves into a double star; hence the double double. If a planet could fit somewhere in there, it could have 4 suns. Probably wouldn't get much sleep....). Then turn everything off, put everything up, and close the observatory, all within an hour. That's pretty fast for me.

Well, that's about it for this time. Should the skies part again for an hour or so, I hope to get another Mars and Saturn.... I've got an idea for something a little different I want to try next time.

PS, Just as an aside, my image happens to show one of the many challenges of imaging, dynamic range. Dynamic range here refers to the difference, in the image, between the lightest and darkest areas. The crater in the upper right of the image is completely white while the left side of the image is completely black.  Computers assign a value of of 0 (zero) to black and 255 to white on most displays (which are 8 bit). When the limits of 0 or 255 are reached, in the image, information is lost. There is no way to discover if there is more information, or image, in either the black or white regions. The "trick" in most imaging is to not reach either limit, 0 or 255, in an image. Sometimes, it just isn't your day... :)